1 10 13 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/ba92ac61d491eb62b28486e13393feb6.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=p8qygYv6I7oj4k1FJ8DqSEqW1cDYan8EJohGMtiQhL3CwB40%7EgOEZakbslMCXfckTIeP8DVnNP5igNZVqmwzzQQE2nIkJuk0q%7EuAhxzrvpMGaJ5HIKi8cqNlKR46jlYw%7EI-A7zoes-w-clINvhhBDGEmEyZiTpBzbLS9qye7yV1GXMmCxgxb3CcUJ3m2%7Edu823HhnAm2TuujBKk1oQ8PN1hXBuxpnLqrlXwkHE%7EFyqye0rFaY8uOBej42xmQERqVxPtzu0ugBTHlbYq-weoVrEfVh%7EtpquVOrHQudbaFcaw4q04nQb%7EL1Azov6jHPhRrpGMH-91LsiOSBX8Eu5PHxg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 3f23529afa838e82eeb8b2eb3d2dce18 PDF Text Text B %V I NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY G. W. FOOTE. ITonbott: X PROGRESSIVE / Y Vi* cm ' PUBLISHING COMPANY, . 28 STONECUTTER STREET, KO. ��B 2>7 ( ON DARWIN GOD BY G. W. FOOTE. LONDON: PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1889. �4 LONDON : PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. 57. EOOTE, AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C. �DARWIN ON GOD. --------- •---------- Only a few feet from the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey, lie the bones of Charles Darwin. The two men are worthy compeers in the scientific roll of fame. Newton’s discovery and estab­ lishment of the law of Gravitation marked an epoch in the history of science, and the same may be said of Darwin’s discovery and establishment of the law of Natural Selection. The Vrincipia and the Origin of Species rank together as two of the most memorablemonuments of scientific genius. In a certain sense, however, Darwin’s achievements are the more remarkable, because they profoundly affect our notions of man’s position and destiny in theuniverse. The great English naturalist was of a. modest and retiring disposition. He shrank from all kinds of controversy. He remarked, in one of his letters to Professor Huxley, that he felt it impossible to understand how any man could get up and make an impromptu speech in the heat of a public discussion. Nevertheless he was demolishing the popular super­ stition far more effectually than the most sinewy and �4 DARWIN ON GOD. dexterous athletes of debate. He was quietly revolu­ tionising the world of thought. He was infusing into the human mind the leaven of a new truth. And the new truth was tremendous in its implications. No wonder the clergy reviled and cursed it. They did not understand it any more than the Inquisitors who burnt Bruno and tortured Galileo understood the Copernican astronomy; but they felt, with a true professional instinct, with that cunning of self-preser­ vation which nature bestows on every species, including priests, that the Darwinian theory was fatal to tlieir deepest dogmas, and therefore to their power, their privileges, and their profits. They had a sure intuition that Darwinism was the writing on the wall, announc­ ing the doom of their empire ; and they recognised that their authority could only be prolonged by hiding the scripture of destiny from the attention of the multitude. The popular triumph of Darwinism must be the death-blow to theology. The Copernican astronomy destroyed the geocentric 'theory, which made the earth the centre of the universe, and all the celestial bodies its humble satellites. From that moment the false astronomy of the Bible was doomed, and its exposure was hound to throw discredit on “ the Word of God/’ From that moment, also, the notion was doomed that the Deity of this inconceivable universe was chiefly occupied with the fortunes of the human insects on this little planet, which is but a speck in the infinitude of space. Similarly the Darwinian biology is a sen­ tence of doom on the natural history of the Bible. Evolution and special creation are antagonistic ideas. �DARWIN ON GOD. 5 And if man himself has descended, or ascended, from lower forms of life; if he has been developed through thousands of generations from a branch of the Simian family ; it necessarily follows that the Garden of Eden is a fairy tale, that Adam and Eve were not the parents of the human race, that the Fall is an oriental legend, that Original Sin is a theological libel on humanity, that the Atonement is an unintelligible dogma, and the Incarnation a relic of ancient mythology. Let it not be forgotten, however, that Darwinism would have been impossible if geology had not pre­ pared its way. Natural Selection wants plenty of elbow-room; Evolution requires immeasurable time. But this could not be obtained until geology had made a laughing-stock of Biblical chronology. The record of the rocks reveals a chronology, not of six thousand, but of millions of years ; and during a vast portion of that time life has existed, slowly ascending to higher stages, and mounting from the monad to man. It was fitting, therefore, that Darwin should dedicate his first volume to Sir Charles Lyell. Darwin was not a polemical writer; on the contrary, his views w7ere advanced with extreme caution. He was gifted with magnificent patience. When the Origin of Species was published he knew that Man was not exempted from the laws of evolution. He satisfied his conscience by remarking that “ Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,” and then waited twelve years before ex­ pounding his final conclusions in the Descent of Man. This has, indeed, been made a subject of reproach. �6 DARWIN ON GOD. But Darwin was surely the best judge as to how and when his theories should be published. He did his own great work in his own great way. There is no question of concealment. He gave his views to the world when they were fully ripened; and if, in a scientific treatise, he forbore to discuss the bearing of his views on the principles of current philosophy and the dogmas of popular theology, he let fall many remarks in his text and footnotes which were sufficient to show the penetrating reader that he was far from indifferent to such matters and had very definite opinions of his own. What could be more striking, what could better indicate his attitude of mind, than the fact that in the Origin of Species he never men­ tioned the book of Genesis, while in the Descent of Man he never alluded to Adam and Eve Such con­ temptuous silence was more eloquent than the most pointed attack. DARWIN’S GRANDFATHER. Before Darwin was born his patronymic had been made illustrious. It is a curious fact that both Darwin and Newton came of old Lincolnshire families. Newton wras born in the county, but the Darwins had removed in the seventeenth century to the neighboring county of Nottingham. William Darwin (born 1655) married the heiress of Robert Waring, of Wilsford. This lady also inherited the manor of Elston, which has remained ever since in the family. It went to the younger son of William Darwin. This Robert Darwin was the father of four sons, the youngest of whom, �DARWIN ON GOD. 7 Erasmus Darwin, was born on December 12, 1731, at Elston Hall. The life of Erasmus Darwin has been charmingly written by his illustrious grandson.1 Prefixed to the Memoir is a photographic portrait from a picture by Wright of Derby. It shows a strong, kind face, dominated by a pair of deep-set, commanding eyes, surmounted by a firm, broad brow and finely modelled head. The whole man looks one in a million. Gazing at the portrait, it is easy to understand his scientific eminence, his great reputation as a successful physician, his rectitude, generosity, and powers of sympathy and imagination. Dr. Erasmus Darwin practised medicine at Derby? but his fame was widespread. While driving to and from his patients he wrote verses of remarkable polish, embodying the novel ideas with which his head fer­ mented. They were not true poetry, although they were highly praised by Edgeworth and Hayley, and even by Cowper; but Byron was guilty of “ the false­ hood of extremes ” in stigmatising their author as “ a mighty master of unmeaning rhyme.” The rhyme was certainly not unmeaning : on the contrary, there was plenty of meaning, and fresh meaning too, but it should have been expressed in prose. Erasmus Darwin had a surprising insight into the methods of nature; he threw out a multitude of pregnant hints in biology, and once or twice he nearly stumbled on the law of Natural Selection. He saw the “ struggle for existence ” with remarkable clearness. “ The stronger 1 Erasmus Darwin. By Ernst Krause. With a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin. London : Murray, 1879. �8 DARWIN ON GOD. locomotive animals/’ lie wrote, ii devour the weaker ones without mercy. Such is the condition of organic nature I whose first law might be expressed in the words, ‘ Eat or be eaten/ and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’’ Mr. G. H. Eewes credits him with “ a profounder insight into psychology than any of his contemporaries and the majority of his successors exhibit,” and says that he <c deserves a place in history for that one admirable conception of psychology as subordinate to the laws of life.” Dr. Maudsley bears testimony to his sagacity in regard to mental disorders ; Dr. Lauder Brunton shows that he anticipated Rosen­ thal’s theory of “ catching cold ” ; and a dozen other illustrations might be given of his scientific prescience in chemistry, anatomy, and medicine. He was also a very advanced reformer. He believed in exercise and fresh air, and taught his sons and daughters to swim. He saw the vast importance of educating girls. He studied sanitation, pointed out how towns should be supplied with pure water, and urged that sewage should be turned to use in agriculture instead of being allowed to pollute our rivers. He also sketched out a variety of useful inventions, which he was too busy to complete himself. Nor did he confine himself to practical reforms. He sympathised warmly with Howard, who was reforming our prison system; and he denounced slavery at the time when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel held slaves in the Barbadoes, and absolutely declined to give them Christian instruction.2 2 Erasmus Darwin, p. 47. �DARWIN ON GOD. 9 No one will be surprised to learn that Erasmus Darwin was a sceptic. Indeed there seems to have been a family tendency in that direction. His sister Susannah, a young lady of eighteen, writing to him at school in his boyhood, after some remarks on abstinence during Lent, said “ As soon as we kill our hog I intend to take a part thereof with the Family, for I’m in­ formed by a learned Divine that Hog's Flesh is Fish, and has been so ever since the Devil entered into them and ran into the Sea.” Bright, witty Susannah 1 She died unmarried, and became, as Darwin says, the “ very pattern of an old lady, so nice looking, so gentle, so kind, and passionately fond of flowers.” Erasmus Darwin’s scepticism was of an early growth. At the age of twenty-three, in a letter to Dr. Okes, after announcing his father’s death he professes a firm belief in “ a superior Ens EntiumJ’ but rejects the notion of a special providence, and says that “ general laws seem sufficient ” ; and while humbly hoping that God will “re-create us ” after death, he plainly asserts that “ the light of Nature affords us not a single argu­ ment for a future state.” He has frequently been called an Atheist, but this is a mistake ; he was a Deist, believing in God, but rejecting Revelation. Even Unitarianism was too orthodox for him, and he wittily called it “ a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.” His death occurred on April 10, 1802. He expired in his arm-chair “ without pain or emotion of any kind.” He had always hoped his end might be painless, and it proved to be so. Otherwise he was not disturbed by the thought of death. “ When I think of dying, ” �10 PARWIN ON GOP. lie wrote to liis friend Edgeworth, “ It is always without pain or fear.” Such a brief account of this extraordinary man would be inadequate to any other purpose, but it suffices to show that Darwin was himself a striking illustration of the law of heredity. Scientific boldness and religious scepticism ran in the blood of his race. ■ DABWIN’S FATHER. Darwin’s father, Robert Waring Darwin, the third son of Erasmus Darwin, settled down as a doctor at Shrewsbury. He had a very large practice, and was a very remarkable man. He stood six-feet two and was broad in proportion. His shrewdness, rectitude and benevolence gained him universal love and esteem. He was reverenced by his great son, who always spoke of him as “ the wisest man I ever knew.’’ His wife was a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, and her sweet, gentle, sympathetic nature was inherited by her famous son. She died in 1817, thirty-two years before her husband, who died on November 13, 1848. There is little, if anything, to be gleaned from any published documents as to the opinions of Darwin’s father. Upon this point Mr. Francis Darwin has been too zealously discreet. Happily I have been furnished with a few particulars by the Rev. Edward Myers, minister of the Unitarian chapel at Shrewsbury. Mrs. Darwin was herself a Unitarian, and she attended with her family the Unitarian chapel in High Street, Shrewsbury, of which the Rev. George Case was then minister. The daughters were all baptised �DARWIN ON GOD. 11 by Mr. Case and their names entered in the chapel register; but the sons were for some reason baptised in the parish church of St. Chad. Charles Darwin attended Mr. Case’s school, and was by him prepared for the Shrewsbury Grammar School. Up to 1825, when he went to the University of Edinburgh, he, with the Darwin family, regularly attended the Uni­ tarian place of worship. But in 1832, after the erec­ tion of St. George’s Church, Frankwell, they left the chapel and went to church. “ Dr. Darwin,” says Mr. Myers, who succeeded Mr. Case, “was never a regular attendant at the Unitarian chapel, but he went occasionally. Indeed, he never regularly attended any place of worship, and his extreme view’s on theological and religious matters were so well known that he used to be commonly spoken of as ‘Dr. Darwin the unbeliever,’ and ‘Dr Darwin the infidel.’ ” The question naturally arises, how could Dr. Darwin have seriously intended his son to become a clergy­ man'? Mr. Myers offers, as I think, a sufficient explanation. The Church at that time was looked upon as simply a professional avenue, like the law or medicine; and, as Mr. Gladstone remarks in his Chapter of Autobiography, “ the richer benefices were very commonly regarded as a suitable provision for such members of the higher families as were least fit to push their way in any other profession requiring thought and labor.” But, the reader will exclaim, how was it possible to include Charles Darwin in this category of incapables 1 The answer is simple. Darwin was not brilliant in his youth. !Iis great �12 DARWIN ON GOD. faculties required time to ripen. He failed as a medical student because lie had an unconquerable antipathy to the sight of blood, and was so afflicted by witnessing a bad operation on a child that he actually ran away. He was always regarded as “ a very ordinary boy/’ to use his own words; and his father once said to him, “ You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat­ catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and your family.’’3 It was a singularly infelicitous pro­ phecy, but it shows Dr. Darwin’s mean opinion of his son’s intellect, and enables us to understand how “ Dr. Darwin the infidel” devoted his unpromising cub to the great refuge of incapacity. DABWIN’S EARLY PIETY. Either the Rev. George Case belonged to the more orthodox wing of Unitarianism, or the teach­ ing at the Shrewsbury Grammar School must have effaced any sceptical impressions he made on the mind of Charles Darwin, whose early piety is evident both from his Autobiography and from several of his letters. And this fact is of the highest importance, since it follows that his disbelief in later years was the result of independent thought and the gradual pressure of scientific truth. “ I well remember,” he says, “ in the early part of my school life that I often had to run very quickly to be in time, and from being a fleet runner was generally successful; but when in doubt I prayed earnestly to 3Life and. Letters of Charles Darwin. Edited by his son, Francis Darwin. Vol. I., p. 32. �DARWIN ON GOD. 13 God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marvelled how generally I was aided. Speaking of himself at the age of twenty or twentyone, he says, “ I did not then doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible?’0 When a little later he went on board the “ Beagle/'’ to take that famous voyage which he has narrated so charmingly, and which determined his subsequent career, he was still “ quite orthodox.’-’ “ I remember/’ he says, “ being laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality/’0 Darwin charitably supposes “ it was the novelty of the argument which amused them/'’ But why was the argument novel ? Simply because the Bible is a kind of fetish, to be worshipped and sworn by, anything but read and followed. As Mill remarked, it furnishes texts to fling at the heads of unbelievers ; but when the Christian is expected to act upon it, he is found to conform to other standards, including his own con­ venience. There can be little doubt that the laughter of his shipmates produced a powerful and lasting effect on Darwin’s mind. His character was translucent and invincibly sincere ; and the laughter of orthodox persons at their own doctrines was calculated to set him thinking about their truth. ALMOST A CLERGYMAN. Being a f allure as a medical student, Darwin received i Life and Letters, vol. i.. p. 31. 5 Vol. I., p. 45. ' 6 Vol. I., p. 308 �14 DARWIN ON GOD. a proposal from his father to become a clergyman, and 1 he rather liked the idea of settling down as a country parson. Fancy Darwin in a pulpit! The finest scientific head since Newton distilling bucolic sermons I What a tragi-comedy it would have been I Darwin carefully read “ Pearson on the Creed,” and other books on divinity. £< I soon persuaded my­ self,” he says, “ that our Creed must be accepted.” He went up to Cambridge and studied hard. “ In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was also necessary to get up'Paley’s Evidences of Christianity and his Moral Philo' sophy. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the ‘ Evidences ’ with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book, and, as I may add, of his Natural Theology, gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that tirqe trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust, I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.” Darwin probably owed most to the Natural Theology of Paley. Writing to Sir John Lubbock nearly thirty years later, he said: “ I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more.” Perhaps it was less the logic of the great Archdeacon than his limpid style and in­ teresting treatment of physical science which charmed the young mind of Darwin. He had a constitutional love of clearness, and his genius was then turning towards the studies which occupied his life. Scruples gradually entered Darwin’s mind. He began to find the creed not so credible. One of his �DARWIN ON GOD. 15 friends gives an interesting reminiscence of this period. “We had an earnest conversation,” says Mr. Herbert, 4< about going into Holy Orders; and I remember his asking me, with reference to the question put by the Bishop in the ordination service, 4 Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit, etc./ whether I could answer in the affirmative, and on my saying I could not, he said, 4 Neither can I, and there­ fore I cannot take holy orders/ ” Still he did not abandon the idea altogether; he drifted away from it little by little until it fell out of sight. Fourteen or fifteen years later, writing to Sir Charles Lyell, he had gone so far as to speak of 44 that Corporate Animal, the Clergy.” Looking back over these experiences, only a few years before his death, Darwin was able to regard them with equanimity and amusement. There is a sly twinkle of humor in the following passage. “ Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman. Nor was this intention and my father’s wish ever formally given up, but died a natural death when, on leaving Cambridge, I joined the 4 Beagle ’ as naturalist. If the phrenologists are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a clergyman. A few years ago the secretary of a German psychological society asked me earnestly by letter for a photo­ graph of myself; and some time afterwards I received the proceedings of one of the meetings, in which it seemed that the shape of my head had been the subject of a public discus­ sion, and one of the speakers declared that I had the bump of reverence,developed enough for ten priests.”7 The Rev. Joseph Cook, of Boston, accounts for 7 Vol. I., p. 45. �16 DARWIN ON GOD. Matthew Arnold's scepticism by the flatness of the top of his head. Mr. Arnold lacked the bump which points to God. But how does Mr. Cook account for the scepticism of Darwin, whose head was piouslyadorned with such a prodigious bump of veneration ? ON BOARD THE “ BEAGLE.” While at Cambridge, studying for the Church, Darwin made the acquaintance of Professor Henslow and Dr. Whewell. He read Humboldt “ with care and profound interest/’ and Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy. These writers excited in him “ a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.5' Humboldt’s description of the glories of Teneriffe made him desire to visit that region. He even “ got an introduction to a merchant in London to inquire about ships." Soon afterwards he became acquainted with Professor Sedgwick, and his attention was turned to geology. On returning from a geological tour in North Wales with Sedgwick he found a letter from Henslow offering him a share of Captain Fitzroy’s cabin on board the “ Beagle," if he cared to go without pay as naturalist. The offer was accepted, Dr. Darwin behaved handsomely, and the young man sailed away with a first-rate equipment and a pecuniary provision for his five years' voyage round the world. This voyage, says Darwin, “ has been by far the most im­ portant event in my life, and has determined my whole career." Readers of Darwin’s fascinating A Naturalist’s �DARWIN ON GOD. 17 Voyage8 know that his great powers were matured on board the “ Beagled’ “ That my mind became deve­ loped through my pursuits during the voyage,” he himself says, “ is rendered probable by a remark made by my father, who was the most acute observer whom I ever saw, of a sceptical disposition, and far from being a believer in phrenology ; for on first seeing me after the voyage, he turned round to my sisters and exclaimed, ‘ Why, the shape of his head is quite altered.’ ” During the voyage Darwin was brought into close and frequent contact with “ that scandal to Christian nations—-Slavery.”9 This was a matter on which he felt keenly. His just and compassionate nature was stirred to the depths by the oppression and sufferings of the American negroes. The infamous scenes he witnessed haunted his imagination. Nearly thirty years afterwards, writing to Dr. Asa Gray, he wished, “though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery.” His im­ pressions at the earlier date were recorded in his book, and it is best to quote the passage in full: “On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was 8 A Naturalist's Voyage. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the Voyage of H. M. S. "Beagle” round the World. By Charles Darwin. 9 Life and Letters,veA, i., p. 237. �18 DARWIN ON GOD. as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted, enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio Janeiro a powerful negro’ afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating for ever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had longed lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authen­ tically heard of ; —nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro, as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes,where the domestic slaves are usually well treated; and they have not, like myself, lived .amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master’s ears. It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; ■as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our �DARWIN ON GOD. 19 poorer countrymen; if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see ; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave­ owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves- into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change 1 Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder I And these deeds are done and palliated by men who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who be­ lieve in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth I”1 The sting of this passage is in its tail. Darwin must have felt that there was something hypocritical and sinister in the pretensions of Christianity. He must have asked himself what was the practical value of a creed which permitted such horrors. SETTLING AT DOWN. Darwin married on January 29, 1839. His wife was singularly helpful, making his home happy, and subordinating herself to the great ends of his life. Children grew up around them, and their home was one of the brightest and best in the world. Here is a pretty touch in Darwin’s letter to his friend Fox, dated from Upper Gower Street, London, July 1840 : “He, (i.e., the baby) is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for 1 defy anyone to say anything in its praise of* Pp. 499—500. �20 DARWIN ON GOD. which we are not fully conscious ... I hacl not the smallest conception there was so much in a five-month baby.'-’ Cunning nature I twining baby fingers about the big man’s heart. Still the proud father studied the cherub as a scientist; he watched its mental growth with the greatest assiduity, and thus began those observations which he ultimately published in the Expression of the Emotions. In September 1842 he went to live at Down, where he continued to reside until his death. He helped to found a Friendly Club there, and served as its treasurer for thirty years. He was also treasurer of a Coal Club. The Rev. Brodie Innes says “ His conduct towards me and my family was one of nnvarying kind­ ness.’"’ Darwin was a liberal contributor to the local charities, and “ he held that where there was really no­ important objection, his assistance should be given to the clergyman, who ought to know the circumstances best, and was chiefly responsible.” He did not, however, go through the mockeyy of attending church. I was informed by the late head constable of Devonport, who was himself an open Atheist, that he had once been on duty for a consider­ able time at Down. He had often seen Darwin escort his family to church, and enjoyed many a conversation with the great man, who used to enjoy a walkthrough the country lanes while the devotions were in progress DEATH AND BURIAL. Darwin’s life henceforth was that of a country gentleman and a secluded scientist. His great works, �DARWIN ON GOD. 21 more revolutionary than all the political and social turmoil of his age, were planned and written in the quiet study of an old house in a Kentish village. He suffered terribly from ill health, but he labored on gallantly to the end, and died in harness. “ For nearly forty years,"’ writes Mr. Francis Darwin, “ he never knew one day of the health ot ordinary men, and thus his life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness.” But no whimperings escaped him, or petulant reproaches on those around him. Always gentle, loving and beloved, he looked on the universe with unswerving serenity. A nobler mixture of sweet­ ness and strength never adorned the earth. In 1876 he wrote some Recollections for his children, with no thought of publication. “I have attempted,” he said, “ to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me.” He was ready for Death, but they did not meet for six years. During February and March, 1882, he wa? obviously breaking. The rest must be told by his son, ‘■No especial change occurred during the beginning of April, but on Saturday 15th he was seized with giddiness while sitting at dinner in the evening, and fainted in an attempt to reach his sofa. On the 17th he was again better, and in my temporary absence recorded for me the progress of an experi­ ment in which I was engaged. During the night of April 18th, about a quarter to twelve, he had a severe attack and passed into a faint, from which he was brought back to consciousness with great difficulty. He seemed to recognise the approach of death, and said, ‘ I am not the least afraid to die.’ All the next morning he suffered from terrible nausea, and hardly �22 DARWIN ON GOD. rallied, before the end came. He died at about four o’clock on Wednesday, April 19tb, 1882”2 Thus the great scientist and sceptic went to his everlasting rest. He had no belief in God, no expec­ tation of a future life. But he had done his duty; he had filled the world with new truth ; he had lived a life of heroism, compared with which the hectic courage of battle-fields is vulgar and insignificant; and he died in soft tranquillity, surrounded by the beings he loved. His last conscious words were I am not the least afraid to die. No one who knew him, or his life and work, could for a moment suspect him capable of fear. Nevertheless it is well to have the words on record from the lips of those who saw him die. The carrion priests who batten on the reputation of dead Free­ thinkers will find no repast in this death-chamber. One sentence frees him from the contamination of their approach. Darwin’s family desired that he should be buried at Down. But the fashion of burying -great men in Westminster Abbey, even though unbelievers, had been set by Dean Stanley, whom Carlyle irreverently called “ the body-snatcher.” Stanley’s successor, Dean Bradley, readily consented to the great heretic’s interment in his House of God, where it is to be presumed the Church of England burial service was duly read over the “ remains.” Men like Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, ind Sir Joseph Hooker should not have assisted at such a blasphemous farce. It was enough to make Darwin groan in his coffin. Well, the Church has Darwin’s corpse, but that is all 2 Li/e and Letters, vol. iii., p. 358. �DAIDVIN ON GOD. 23 she can boast; and as she paid the heavy price of telling lies at his funeral, it may not in the long run prove a profitable transaction. She has not buried Darwin’s ideas. They are still at work, sapping and undermining her very foundations. PURPOSE OF THIS PAMPHLET. My object is to show the general reader what were Darwin’s views on religion, and, as far as possible, to trace the growth of those views in his mind. I desire to point out, in particular, how he thought the leading ideas of theology were affected by the doctrine of evolution. Further, I wish to prove that there is no essential difference between his Agnosticism and what has always been taught as Atheism. Finally, I mean to give my own notions on evolution and theism. In doing so, I shall be obliged to consider some points raised by anti-materialists, especially by Dr. A. B. Wallace in his recent volume on Darwinism. SOME OBJECTIONS. Let me first, however, answer certain objections. It is contended by those who would minimise the impor­ tance of Darwin’s scepticism that he was a scientist and not a theologian. When it is replied that this objection is based upon a negation of private judgment, and logically involves the handing over of society to the tender mercies of interested specialists, the objectors fall back upon the mitigated statement that �24 D ARAVIN ON GOD. Darwin was too much occupied with science to give adequate attention to the problems of religion. Now, in the first place, this is not really true. He certainly disclaimed any special fitness to give an opinion on such matters, but that was owing to his exceptional modesty; and to take advantage of it by accepting it as equiva­ lent to a confession of unfitness, is simply indecent on the part of those who never tire of holding up the testimony of Newton, Herschel, and Faraday to the truth of their creed. Darwin gave sufficient attention to religion to satisfy himself. He began to abandon Christianity at the age of thirty. Writing of the period between October, 1836 and January, 1839, he says “ During those two years I was led to think much about religion.”3 That the subject occupied his mind at other times is evident from his works and letters. He had clearly weighed every argument in favor of Theism and Immortality, and his brief, precise way of stating the objections to them shows that they were perfectly familiar. True, he says “I have never systematically thought much on religion in relation to science,” but this was in ansAver to a request that he should write something for publication. In the same sentence he says that he had not systematically thought much on “ morals in relation to society.” But he had thought enough to write that wonderful fourth chapter in the first part of the Descent of Man, which Avas published in that very year. Darwin was so modest, so cautious, and so thorough, that “ systematic thought” meant with him an infinitely greater stress 3 Life and Letters, vol. i., p. 307. �DARWIN ON GOD. 25 of mind than is devoted to religious problems by one theologian in a million. The next objection is more subtle, not to say fan­ tastic. In his youth Darwin was fond of music. He had no technical knowledge of it, nor even a good ear, but it filled him with delight, and sometimes sent a shiver down his backbone. He was also fond of poetry, reading Shakespeare, Coleridge, Byron, and Scott, and carrying about a pocket copy of Milton. But in later life he lost all interest in such things, and trying to read Shakespeare again after 18/0 he found it “so intolerably dull” that it “nauseated” him. His intense pre-occupation with science had led to a partial atrophy of his aesthetic faculties. It was a loss to him, but the world gained by the sacrifice. Now upon this fact is based the objection I am dealing with. In the days of Sir Isaac Newton or Bishop Butler, when belief was supposed to rest on evidence, the objection would have seemed pre­ posterous; but it is gravely urged at present, when religion is fast becoming a matter of candles, music, and ornament, seasoned with cheap sentimentality. Darwin’s absorption in intellectual pursuits, and the consequent neglect of the artistic elements in his nature, is actually held as a sufficient explanation of his scepticism. His highly-developed and constantlysustained moral nature is regarded as having no relation to the problem. Religion, it seems, is neither morality nor logic; it is spirituality. And what is spirituality ? Why, a yearning aftei' the vague, the unutterable; a consciousness of the sinfulness of sin; a perpetual study of one’s blessed self ; a debauch of �26 DARWIN ON GOD. egotistic emotion and chaotic fancy; in short, a highlyrefined development of the feelings of a cow in a thunderstorm, and the practices of a savage before his inscrutible fetish. Spirituality is an emoti mal offshoot of religion ; but religion itself grows out of belief; and belief, even among the lowest savages, is grounded on evidence. The Church has always had the sense to begin with doctrines; it enjoins upon its children to say first of all “ I believed’ Let the doctrines go, and the senti­ ments will go also. It is only a question of time. Darwin tested.the doctrines. Miracles, special provi­ dence, the fall, the incarnation, the resurrection, the existence of an all-wise and all-good God; all seemed to him statements which should be proved. He there­ fore put them into the crucible of reason, and they turned out to be nothing but dross. According to the “ spiritual ” critics this was a mistake, religion being a matter of imagination. Quite so ; here Darwin is in agreement with them; and thus again the proverb is verified that “ extremes meet.” The last objection is almost too peurile to notice. It has been asserted that Darwin was an unconscious believer, after all; and this astonishing remark is supported by exclamations from his letters. He frequently wrote “ God knows,” “would to God,” and so forth. But he sometimes wrote “ By Jove,” from which it follows that he believed in Jupiter 1 Ou one occasion he informed Dr. Hooker that he had recovered from an illness,and could “ eat like a hearty Christian/ ’ from which it follows that he believed in the connection of Christianity and voracity 1 �DARWIN ON GOD. 27 Mr. F. W. FI. Myers is too subtle a critic to raise this objection in its natural crudity. He affects to regard Darwin’s tranquillity under the loss of religious belief as a puzzle. He asks why Darwin kept free from the pessimism which “ in one form or other has paralysed or saddened so many of the best lives of our time.” What “ kept the melancholy infection at bay?” “ Here, surely, is the solution of the problem. The faculties of observing and. reasoning were stimulated to the utmost; the domestic affections were kept keen and strong; but the atrophy of the religious instinct, of which we have already spoken, extended yet farther—over the whole range of aesthetic emotion, and mystic sentiment—over all in us which‘looks before and after, and pines for what is not.’ ”4 This is pretty writing, but under the form of insi­ nuation it begs the question at issue. Keligious instinct and mystic sentiment are fine phrases, but they prove nothing; on the contrary, they are devices for dispensing with that logical investigation which reli­ gion ever shuns as the Devil is said to shun holy water. DARWIN ABANDONS CHRISTIANITY. Dr. Buchner, the German materialist, who was in London in September, 1881, went to Down and spent some hours with Darwin. Fie was accompanied by Dr. E. B. Aveling, who has written an account of their conversation in Darwin’s study.5 This pamphlet is 4 Charles Darwin and Agnosticism. By F. W. H. Myers, “Fort­ nightly Review,” January, 1888, p. 106. 5 The Religious Views of Charles Darwin. By Dr. E. B. Aveling. Freethought Publishing Co. �28 DARWIN ON GOD. referred to in a footnote by Mr. Francis Darwin, who says that “ Dr. Aveling gives quite fairly his impres­ sion cf my father’s views.” 6 He does not contradict any of Dr. Aveling’s statements, and they may there­ fore be regarded as substantially correct. Darwin said to his guests, “ I never gave up Chris­ tianity until I was forty years of age.” He had given attention to the matter, and had investigated the claims of Christianity. Being asked why he abandoned it, he replied, “ It is not supported by evidence.” This reminds one of a story about George Eliot. A gentleman held forth to her at great length on the beauty of Christianity. Like Mr. Myers, he was great at “aesthetic emotion” and “mystic sentiment.” The great woman listened to him with philosophic patience, and at length she struck in herself. “Well, you know,” she said, “ I have only one objection to Christianity.” “And what is that?” her guest en­ quired. “ Why,” she replied, “it isn’t true.” Dr. Aveling’s statement is corroborated by a long and interesting passage in Darwin’s chapter of Auto­ biography, which the reader shall have in full. “I had gradually come by this time, that is, 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question then continually rose before my mind and would not be banished,—Is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This appeared to me utterly incredible. “ By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by 0 Vol. I., p. 317. �DARWIN ON GOD. 29 which Christianity is supported,—and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become,—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us,—'that tho Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events,—that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual in­ accuracies of eye-witnesses;—by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Chris­ tianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. “ But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day­ dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gcspels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.”7 Three features should be noted in this striking passage. First, the order in which the evidences of Christianity were tried and found wanting; second, the complete mastery of every important point; third, the absence of all distress of mind in the process. Darwin’s mind was, in fact, going through a new development, and the old creed was got rid of as easily as an old skin when a new one is taking its place. For nearly forty years Darwin was a disbeliever in Christianity. He rejected it utterly. It passed out of his mind and heart. The fact was not proclaimed 7 Vol. I., pp. 308-309. �30 DARWIN ON GOT). from the house-tops, but it was patent to every intelli­ gent reader of his works. He paid no attention to the clerical dogs that barked at his heels, but wisely kept his mind free from such distractions, and went on his way, as Professor Tyndall says, with the steady and irresistible movement of an avalanche. Much capital has been made by Christians who are thankful for small mercies out of the fact that Darwin subscribed to the South American Missionary SocietyThe Archbishop of Canterbury, at the annual meeting on April 21, 1885, said the Society “ drew the atten­ tion of Charles Darwin, and made him, in his pursuit of the wonders of the kingdom of nature, realise that there was another kingdom just as wonderful and more lasting.” Such language is simply fraudulent. The fact is, Darwin thought the Fuegians a set of hopeless savages, and he was so agreeably undeceived by the reports of their improvement that he sent a subscription of £5 through his old shipmate Admiral Sir James Sullivan. This gentleman gives three or four extracts from Darwin’s letters,8 from which it appears that he was solely interested in the secular improvement of the Fuegians, without the smallest concern for their pro­ gress in religion. Darwin subscribed to send missionaries to a people he regarded as “ the very lowest of the human race.” Surely this is not an extravagant compliment to Christianity. He never subscribed towards its promo­ tion in any civilised country. Those who parade his “support*” invite the sarcasm that he'thought their religion fit for savages. s Vol. III., pp. 127-128. �DARWIX OX GOD. o1 Dl DEISM. Having abandoned Christianity, Darwin remained for many years a Deist. The Naturalist’s Voyage was first published in 1845, and the following passage occurs in the final chapter : “ Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied products of the God of Nature :—no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”9 This is the language of emotion, and no one will be surprised at Darwin's saying subsequently “ I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life/71 How great a change the thinking wrought is seen, from a reference to this very incident in the Autobiography, written in 1876, a few years before his death. “ At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. Formerly I was led by such feelings as those just referred to (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the exist­ ence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘ it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. 9 P. 508. 1 Life and Letters, vol. i., p. ,309. �32 D ARAVIN ON GOD. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such con­ viction and feelings to rise in my mind.” 2 ! Darwin's belief in a personal God had not per­ ceptibly weakened in 1859, when he published the Origin of Species. He could still speak of “the Creator’' and use the ordinary language of Deism. In a letter to Mr. C. Ridley, dated November 28, 1878, upon a sermon of Dr. Pusey’s, he said, “ When I was collecting facts for the £ Origin ’ my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself."3 It is therefore obvious that Darwin doubted Chris­ tianity at the age of thirty, abandoned it before the age of forty, and remained a Deist until the age of fifty. The publication of the Origin of Species' may be taken as marking the commencement of his third and last mental epoch. The philosophy of Evolution took possession of his mind, and gradually expelled both the belief in God and the belief in immortality. His development was too gradual for any wrench. People upon whom his biological theories came as lightning-swift surprises often fancied that he must be deeply distressed by such painful truths. Some­ times, indeed, this suspicion was carried to a comical extreme. “Lyell once told me,” says Professor Judd, “ that he had frequently been asked if Darwin was not one of the most unhappy of men, it being sug­ gested that his outrage upon public opinion should have filled him with remorse."4 How it would have astonished these simple creatures to see Darwin in his 2 Vol. I., p. 811. 3 Vol. III., p. 236. 4 Vol. HI., p. 62. �DARWIN ON GOD. 33 happy home, reclining on the sofa after a hard day’s work, while his devoted wife or daughter read a novel aloud or played some music ; or perhaps smoking an occasional cigarette, one of his few concessions to the weakness of the flesh. CREATION. Evolution and Creation are antagonistic ideas, nor can they he reconciled by the cheap device of assum­ ing their cooperation “ in the beginning.” When the theologians spoke of Creation, in the pre-Darwinian days, they meant exactly the same as ordinary people who employed the term ; namely, that everything in nature was brought into existence by an express fiat of the will of God. The epithet “ special ” only hides the fate of Creation from the short-sighted. To say that the Deity produced the raw material of the universe, with all its properties, and then let it evolve into what we see, is simply to abandon the real idea of Creation and to take refuge in a metaphysical dogma. Creation is only a pompous equivalent for “ God did it.” Before the nebular hypothesis explained the origin, growth, and decay of the celestial bodies, the theologian used to inquire “ Who made the world ? ” When that conundrum was solved he asked a fresh question, “ Who made the plants and animals ? ” When that conundrum was solved he asked another question, “ Who made man? ” Now that conundrum is solved he asks “ Who created life 1 ” And when the Evolutionists reply “ Wait a little ; we shall see,” he puts his final poser, “ Who made matter ? ” �34 DARWIN ON GOD. All along the line he has been saying “ God did it” to everything not understood ; that is, he has turned ignorance into a dogma. Every explanation compels him to beat a retreat; nay more, it shows that “ making ” is inapplicable. Nature’s method is growth. Making is a term of art, and when applied to nature it is sheer anthropomorphism. The baby who prattles to her doll, and the theologian who prates of Creation, have a common philosophy. When the Origin of Species was published, we have seen that Darwin firmly believed in a personal God. Unfortunately he allowed himself, in the last chapter, to use language, not unnatural in a Deist, but still equivocal and misleading. He spoke, for instance, of “ the laws impressed on matter by the Creator.-” This is perhaps excusable, but there was a more unhappy sentence in which he spoke of life “having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” A flavor of Genesis is in these words, and the clergy, with their usual unscrupulousness, have made the most of it; taking care not to read it, or let their hearers read it, in the light of Darwin’s later writings. In a letter to Sir J. D. Hooker, dated March 13, 1863, Darwin writes, “ I had a most kind and delight­ fully candid letter from Lyell, who says he spoke out as far as he believes. I have no doubt his belief failed him as he wrote, for I feel sure that at times he no more believed in Creation than you or I.”5 Writing again to Hooker, in the same month, he said: “ I have 5 Vol. III., p. 15. The italics are mine. �DARWIN ON GOD. 35 long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentatcuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘ appeared ’ by some wholly unknown process/’6 “ Truckling ” is a strong word. I fancy Darwin was too severe in his self-reproach. I prefer to regard the unhappy sentences about Creation as the slip-shod expressions of a roan who was still a Deist, and who, possessing little literary tact, failed to guard himself against a misuse of popular language. The greatest misfortune was that the book was before the public, and the expressions could hardly be withdrawn or altered without a full explanation; from which I dare say he shrank, as out of place in a scientific treatise. ORIGIN OF LIFE. “ Spontaneous generation is a paradoxical phrase, and it has excited a great deal of unprofitable discus­ sion. However the controversy rests between Bastian and Tyndall, the problem of the origin of life isentirely unaffected. Nor need we entertain Sir William Thomson’s fanciful conjecture that life may have been brought to this planet on a meteoric frag­ ment, for this only puts the radical question upon the shelf. We may likewise dismiss the theory of Dr. Wallace, who holds that “ complexity of chemical compounds ” could “ certainly not have produced living protoplasm.” 7 “ Could not,” in the existing state of knowledge, is simply dogmatism. Dr. Wallace has a spiritual hypothesis to maintain, and like the 8 Vol. Ill, p. 18. 7 Darwinism, p. 474. �36 DARWIN ON GOD. crudest theologian, though in a superior style, he introduces his little theory, with a polite bow, to account for what is at present inexplicable. The thorough-going Evolutionist is perfectly satisfied to wait for information. So much has been explained already that it is folly to be impatient. The presump­ tion, meanwhile, is in favor of continuity. Argument without facts is a waste of time and temper. “It is mere rubbish,” Darwin said, “thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” 8 This was written in 1863, in a letter to Hooker. Darwin could not help seeing, however, that the conditions favorable to the origination of life might only exist once in the history of a planet. A very suggestive passage is printed by Mr. Francis Darwin as written by his father in 1871. “ It is often said that all the conditions for the first produc­ tion of a living organism are now present which could ever have been present. But if (and oh ! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”9 Darwin appears to have felt that life have originated naturally. The interposition of an imagi­ nary supernatural cause does not solve the problem. It cuts the Gordian knot, perhaps, but does not untie it. Nature is full of illustrations of the truth that “ properties ” exist in complex compounds which do 8^Vol. III., p. 18. 9 Vol. III., p. 18, footnote. �DABWIN ON GOD. 37 not appear in the separate ingredients. Huxley rightly inquires what justification there is for “ the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it.” 1 There is no more mystery in the origin of life than in the formation of water by an electric spark which traverses a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Dr. Wallace appears to see this, and consequently he ascribes electricity, with gravitation, cohesion, and chemical force, to the “ spiritual world ! ” 2 ORIGIN OF MAN. Darwin’s masterpiece, in the opinion of scientists, is the Origin of Species. But the Descent of Alan is more important to the general public. As applied to other forms of life, Evolution is a profoundly inte­ resting theory; as applied to man, it revolutionises philosophy, religion, and morals. Tracing the development of animal organisms from the ascidian, Darwin passes along the line of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, marsupials, mammals, and finally to the simians. “ The Simiadee then branched off,” he says, “ into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys ; and from the latter, at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe, proceeded.”3 Notwithstanding that some specimens of the “ wonder and glory of the universe ” cannot count 1 Lay Sermons, p. 137. 2 Darwinism, p. 476. 3 Descent of Man, p. 165. �38 DARWIN ON GOD. above the number of the fingers of one hand, while some of them live in a shocking state of bestiality, Darwin's deliverance on the origin of man was greeted with a storm of execration. “Fancy/’ it was ex­ claimed, “ fancy recognising the monkey as our first cousin, and the lower animals as our distant rela­ tions ! Pshaw 1 ” The protesters forgot that there is no harm in “ coming from monkeys ” if you have come far enough. Some of them, perhaps, had a shrewd suspicion that they had not come far enough; and, like parvenus, they were ashamed to own their poor relations. Anticipating the distastefulness of his conclusions, Darwin pointed out that, at any rate, we were descended from barbarians; and why, he inquired, should we shrink from owning a still lower relation­ ship ? ' ' “ He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide with­ out remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”4 Eighteen years have passed since then, and Darwin’s views have triumphed. The clergy still “hum’-’ and “ha'” and shake their heads, but the scientific world has accepted Darwinism with practical 4 Descent of Man, p. 619. �39 DARWIN ON GOD. unanimity. Even Dr. Wallace, who at first hesitated, is now convinced. “ I fully accept Mr. Darwin’s conclusions,” he says, “ as to the essential identity of man’s bodily structure with that of the higher mam­ malia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes. The evi­ dence of such descent appears to me to be overwhelming and conclusive.”5 Now if Darwin’s theory of the origin of man is accepted we may bid good-bye to Christianity at once. But that is not all. The continuity of development implies a common nature, from the lowest form of life to the highest. There is no break from the ascidian to man, just as there is no break from the ovum to the child; and neither in the history of the race nor in the history of the individual is there any point at which natural causes cease to be adequate, and super­ natural causes are necessary to account for the pheno­ mena. The tendency of Darwinism, says Dr. Wallace, is to “ the conclusion that man’s entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived.” G Dr. Wallace sees that this is sheer materialism, and casts about for something to support his spiritualistic philosophy. He assumes three stages at which “ the spirit world ” intervened. First, when life appeared; second, when consciousness began; third, when man became possessed of “ a 3 Darwinism, p. 461. 6 P. 461. �40 DARWIN ON GOD. number of his most characteristic and noblest facul­ ties.” All this is very ingenious, but Dr. Wallace forgets two things ; first, that the “ stages ” he refers to are purely arbitrary, each point being approached and receded from by insensible gradations; and second, that his “ Spirit world ” is not a vera causa. It is, indeed, a pure assumption ; unlike such a cause as Natural Selection, which is seen to operate, and which Darwin only extended over the whole range of organic existence. With respect to his third “ stage,” Dr. Wallace contends that Natural Selection does not account for the mathematical, musical, and artistic faculties. Were this true, they might still be regarded, in Weismann’s phrase, as “a bye-product” of the human mind, which is so highly developed in all directions. But its truth is rather assumed than proved. Taking the mathematical faculty, for instance, Dr. Wallace makes the most of its recent developments, and the least of its early manifestations ; which is a fallacy of exaggeration or false emphasis. He also under­ rates the mathematical faculty displayed even in the rudest warfare. There is a certain calculation of number and space in every instance. It is smaller in in the savage chief than in Napoleon, but the differ­ ence is in degree and not in kind; and as the human race has always lived in a more or less militant state, the mathematical faculty would give its posses­ sors an advantage in the struggle for existence; while, in more modern times, and in a state of complex civilisation, its possessors would profit by what may be called Social Selection. �DARWIN ON GOD. 41 Dr. Wallace lias discovered a mare’s nest. He may rely upon it that the basis of beauty is utility; in the mind of man as well as in architecture, or the plumage of birds, or the coloration of flowers. And we may well ask him these pertinent questions ; first, why did “ the spirit world ” plant the mathematical, musical, and artistic faculties in man so ineffectually that, even, now, they are decidedly developed in less than one per cent, of the population ; and, second, why are we to suppose a divine origin for those faculties when the moral faculties, which are quite as imperial, may be found in many species of lower animals ? ANIMISM. Dr. Tylor is not a biologist, but he is one of the greatest evolutionists of our age. His work on Primitive Culture7 is a monument of genius and re­ search. Employing the Darwinian method, he has traced the origin and development of the belief in the existence of soul or spirit, from the mistaken interpre­ tation of the phenomena of dreams among savages, who afford us the nearest analogue of primitive man, up to the most elaborate cultus of Brahmanism. Buddhism, or Christianity. And as Animism is the basis of all religion, two conclusions arc forced upon us ; first, that the supernatural in being traced back to its primal germ of error, is not only explained but exploded ; and, second, that religion is a direct legacy from our savage progenitors. Religious progress consists in mitigating the intellectual and moral erudi- «• 7 Primitive Culture. By Edward B. Tylor LL.D. 2 vols. �42 DARWIN ON GOD. ties of primitive Animism ; and religion itself, there­ fore, is like a soap-bubble, ever becoming more and more attenuated, until at length it disappears. Darwin had written the Descent of Man before reading the great work of Dr. Tylor, and his letter to the author of the real Natural History of Religion is worth extracting. It is dated September 24, 1871. “ I hope you will allow me to have the pleasure of telling you how greatly I have been interested by your Primitive Culture now that I have finished it. It seems to me a most profound work, which will be certain to have permanent value, and to be referred to for years to come. It is wonderful how you trace Animism from the lower races up to the religious belief of the highest races. It will make me for the future look at religion—a belief in the soul, etc—from anew point of view.’’8 “A new point of view” is a pregnant phrase in regard to a subject of such importance. What can it mean, except that Darwin saw at last that religion began with the belief m soul, and that the belief in soul originated in the blunder of primitive men as to the “ duality ” of their nature ? Darwin has a very interesting footnote on this subject in his Descent of Man. After referring to Tylor and Lubbock, he continues— “ Mr. Herbert Spencer accounts for the earliest forms of religious belief throughout the world by man being led through dreams, shadows, and other causes, to look at himself as a double essence, corporeal and spiritual. As the spiritual being is supposed to exist after death, and to be powerful, it is propitiated by various gifts and ceremonies, and its aid invoked. He then further shows that names or nicknames given from some animal or other object, to the early progenitors or founders Life and Letters, vol. III., p. �DARWIN ON GOD. 43 of a tribe, are supposed after a long interval to represent the real progenitor of the tribe; and such animal or object is then naturally believed still to exist as a spirit, is held sacred, and worshipped as a god. Nevertheless I cannot but suspect that there is a still earlier and ruder stage, when anything which manifests power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form cf life, and with mental faculties analogous to our own.” 9 This is tracing religion to the primitive source assigned to it by David Hume—“ the universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”* In other words, 1 Darwin begins a stage lower than Animism, in the con­ fusion of subjective and objective such as we see in a very young child ; although, of course, the worship of gods could not have obtained in that stage, since man is incapable of ascribing to nature any qualities but those he is conscious of possessing, and it is therefore impossible for him to people the external world with spirits until he has formed the notion of a spirit within himself. Darwin was not attracted by that experiential Animism which has such a fascination for Dr. Wallace. In 1870 he attended a seance at the house of his brother Erasmus in Chelsea, under the auspices of a well-known medium. His account of the performance is not very flattering to Spiritualism. “ We had great fun one afternoon; for George hired a medium who made the chairs, a flute, a bell, and candlestick, and fiery Descent of Man, p. 94. 1 Hume, “ Natural History of Religion,” section III. �44 DARWIN ON GOD. points jump about in my brother’s dining-room, in a manner that astounded every one, and took away all their breaths. It was in the dark, but George and Hensleigh Wedgwood held the medium’s hands and feet on both sides all the time. I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery took place. How the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding.” 2 The more Darwin thought over what he saw the more convinced he was that it was “all imposture.” “ The Lord have mercy on us all,” he exclaimed, “ if we have to believe in such rubbish.” Darwin has not left us any emphatic utterance as to his own belief about soul. “ What Darwin thought.” says Mr. Grant Allen, “ I only suspect; but if we make the plain and obvious inference from all the facts and tendencies of his theories we shall be constrained to admit that modern biology lends little sanction to the popular notion of a life after death.” 3 Writing briefly to an importunate German student, in 1879, he said “ As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabili­ ties.”4 This reminds one of Hamlet’s “ shadow of a shade.” First, you have no certainty, nor even a probability, but several probabilities ; these are vague to begin with, and alas! they conflict with each other. Surely such language could only come from a practical unbeliever. Like other men who were nursed in the delusion of personal immortality, Darwin had his occasional fits Vol. Ill,, p. 187. 3 The GoKpd A wording to Darwin. By Grant Allen, “ Pall Mall Gazette,” January, 1888. 4 Vol. I., p. 307. �DARWIN ON GOD. 45 of dissatisfaction with the inevitable—witness the following passage from his Autobiography. “ With respect to immortality, nothing shows me so clearly how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consid­ eration of the view now held by most physicists, namely, thatthe sun with all the planets will in time grow too coldfoi life? unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immoitality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.”5 Had Darwin been challenged on this passage, I think he would have admitted its ineptitude, for he was modest enough for anything. The thought that every man must die is no more intolerable than the thought that any man must die, nor is the thought that there will be a universe 'without the human race any more intolerable than the thought that there teas a universe without the human race. On the other hand, Darwin did not allow for the fact that immor­ tality is not synonymous with everlasting felicity. According to most theologies, indeed, the lot of the majority in the next life is not one of happiness, but one of misery; and, on any rational estimate, the annihilation of all is better than the bliss of the few and the torture of the many. Nor is it true that everyone would cheerfully accept the gift of immor­ tality, even without the prospect of future suffering. Every Buddhist—that is, four hundred millions of the 5Vol. I,, p. 312. �46 PAE WIN ON GOD. human race—looks forward to “ Nirvana,” the extinc­ tion of the individual life, which is thus released from the evil of existence. Even a Western philo­ sopher, like John Stuart Mill, understood this yearning as appears from the following passage : “ It appears to me not only possible but probable, that in a higher, and, above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea ; and that human nature, though pleased with the present, and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained to a conscious existence which it cannot be insured that it will always wish to preserve.”8 Mr. Winwood Reade, on the other hand, indulged in the rapturous prophecy that man will some day grow perfect, migrate into space, master nature, and invent immortality.7 It is all a matter of taste and tempera­ ment. Both wailings and rejoicings are outside the scope of philosophy, and belong to the province of light literature, A PERSONAL GOD. We have already seen that Darwin remained a Deist after rejecting Christianity. Not only in the letter on Dr. Pusey’s sermon, but in his Autobiography, Darwin discloses the fact that his belief in a personal God melted away after the publication of his masterpiece. Speaking of “ a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man,” he says, This conclusion was strong in my mind about the * Three Euxayx on Reliyion By J. S. Mill, p. 122. i Martrydom of Man. By Win wood Reade, pp, 51.4, 515. �DAB WIN ON GOD. 47 time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker/’'’ By the time he published the Descent of Man, in 1871, the change was conspicuous. He was then able to treat religion as a naturalist; that is, as one who stands out­ side it and regards it with a feeling of scientific curiosity. Not only did he trace religion back to the lowest fetishism, he also analysed the sentiment of worship in a manner which must have been highly displeasing to the orthodox. “ The feeling- of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being coukl experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behavior of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braub ich goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as a god.”9 This is not very flattering, for the dog’s attach­ ment to his master is quite independent of morality; whether the dog belongs to Bill Sikes or John Howard, he displays the same devotion. Darwin quoted with approval the statement of Sir John Lubbock that “it is not too much to say that 3 Vol. I., p. 313. Descent of Man, pp. 95, 96. �48 DARWIN ON GOD. the horrible dread of unknown evil hangs like a thick cloud over savage life, and embitters every pleasure.”1 He also referred to witchcraft, bloody sacrifices, and the ordeals of poison and fire, cautiously observing that “ it is well occasionally to reflect on these super­ stitions, for they show us what an infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason to science, and to our accumulated knowledge ”2—in short, to the slow and painful civilisation of religion. That the universal belief in God proves his exist­ ence Darwin was unable to admit. “ There is ample evidence, he says, ££ derived not from hasty travellers but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their language to express such an idea.”* On the other hand, as he remarks in the same work— “ I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man ; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Deity.’’4 Attention should here be called to a silent correction in the second edition of the Descent of Man. Defer­ ring to the question “ whether there exists a Creator and Euler of the universe,” he said, ££ this has been answered in the affirmative by'the highest intellects that have ever existed.” This was altered into “some 1 Prehistoric Times. By Sir John Lubbock, p. 571. 2 Descent of Man, p. 96. 3 Ibid, p. 93. 4 Ibid, p. 612. �DARWIN ON GOD. 49 o/the highest intellects.’'’ Darwin had discovered the inaccuracy of his first statement, and learnt that some of the highest intellects have been Atheists. Two important passages must be extracted from hie Autobiography. After remarking that the grandest scenes had no longer the power to make him feel that God exists, he answers the objection that he is “like a man who has become color-blind/’ which is a favorite one with conceited religionists. “ This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. There­ fore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essenti­ ally differ from that which is often called the sense of sub­ limity ; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music.’5 Further on in the same piece of writing he deals with a second and very common argument of Theism. “ Another source of conviction in the existence of God, con­ nected with the reason, and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty, or rather utter impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having, an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man. Tlii s conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since 3 Vol I., p. 312. �50 DARWIN ON GOD. that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions ? ” 6 This handling of the matter may be somewhat con­ soling to Theists. One can hear them saying, “ Ah, Darwin was not utterly lost.” But let them see how he handles the matter in a letter to a Dutch student (April 2, 1873). “ I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God ; but whether this is an argument of real value I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am also induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.’ ‘ “ Man can do his duty ”—a characteristic touch ! The man who said this did his duty. His scientific achievments were precious, but they were matched by his lofty and benevolent character. DESIGN. Darwinism has killed the Design argument, by explaining adaptation as a result without assuming design as a cause. The argument, indeed, like all Vol. I., pp. 312, 313. - Vol. I., pp. 306, 307. �DARWIN ON GOD. 51 “ proofs” of God’s existence, was based upon ignorance. It was acutely remarked by Spinoza, in his great majestic manner, that man knows that he wills, but knows not the causes which determine his will. Out of this ignorance the theologians manufac­ tured their chaotic doctrine of free-will. Similarly, out of our ignorance of the caus s of the obvious adaptations in nature, they manufactured their plausible Design argument. The “ fitness of things ” was indis­ putable, and as it could not be explained scientifically, the theologians trotted out their usual dogma of “ God did it.” Professor Huxley tells us that physical science has created no fresh difficulties in theology. “Not a solitary problem,” he says, “ presents itself to the philosophical Theist, at the present day, which has not existed from the time that philosophers began to think out the logical grounds and theological consequenceof Theism.”8 While in one respect true, the states ment is liable to mislead. Adaptation presents no new problem—that is undeniable ; but the scientific expla­ nation of it Cuts away the ground of. all teleology. “ The teleology,” says Huxley, “ which supposes that the'eye, such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its deathbloAv.” Yet he bids us remember that “ there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental 8Zf/e and Letter?, vol. II., p. 202. �52 DARWIN ON GOD. proposition of Evolution. This proposition is that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the powers possessed by the molecules of which the primi­ tive nebulosity of the universe was composed.”0 Theologians in search of a life-buoy in the scientific storm have grasped at this chimerical support, although the wiser heads amongst them may doubt whether Pro­ fessor Huxley is serious in tendering it. Surely if eyes were not made to see with the Design argument is dead. What is the use of saying that the materialist is still “ at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that the primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe?” The, very word “arrangement” gives the teleologist all he requires, and the implied assumption that we are “ at the mercy” of anyone who makes an assertion which is incapable of proof, simply because he “ defies ” us to disprove it, is a curious ineptitude on the part of such a vigorous thinker. When, in 1879, Darwin was consulted by a German student, a member of his family replied for him as follows :—“ He considers that tlie theory of Evolution is quite compatible with belief in God; but that you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God.”1 Precisely so. You may believe in God if you define him so as not to contradict facts ; in other words, you have a right to a Deity if you choose to construct one. This is perfectly harmless, but what connexion has it with the »Vol. II., p. 201. 1 Vol. I., p. 307. �DAPAVIN ON GOD. 53 “ philosophy ” of Theism ? There is no definition of God which does not contradict facts. Why, indeed, is theology full of mystery? Simply because it is full of impasses, where dogma and experience are in hopeless collision, and where we are exhorted to abnegate our reason and accept the guidance of faith. Darwin’s attitude towards the Design argument is definite enough for such a cautious thinker. In one of his less popular, but highly important works, the first edition of which appeared in 1868, he went out of his way to deal with it. After using the simile of an architect, who should rear a noble and commodious edifice, without the use of cut stone, by selecting stones of various shape from the fragments at the base of a precipice; he goes on to say that these “ fragments of stone, though indispensable to the architect, bear to the edifice built by him the same relation which the fluctuating varieties of organic beings bear to the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by their modified descendants.” The shape of the stones is not accidental, for it depends on geological causes, though it may be said to be accidental with regard to the use they are put to. “ Here we are led to face a great difficulty, in alluding to which I am aware that I am travelling beyond my proper province. An omniscient Creator must have foreseen every consequence which results from the laws imposed by Him. But can itbe reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered, if we use the words in any ordinary sense, that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice ? If the various laws which have determined the shape of each fragment were not predeter­ mined for the builder’s sake, can it be maintained with any �54 DARWIN ON GOD. greater probability that He specially ordained for the sake of the breeder each of the innumerable variations in our domestic animals and plants ;—many of these variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves ? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds ? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man’s brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case,—if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order that the greyhound, for instance, that perfect image of symmetry and vigour, might be formed,—no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man in­ cluded, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “ along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent end omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face te face with a difficulty as insoluble as that of free will and predestination.2 Darwin protested that this had met with no reply. What reply, indeed, is possible ? Design covers every2 Farfniwn of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Charles Darwin. Vol. II., pp. 427, 428. By �DARWIN ON GOD. 55 thing or nothing. If the bulldog was not designed, what reason is there for supposing that man was designed ? If there is no design in an idiot, how can there be design in a philosopher 1 The Life and Letters contains many passages less elaborate but more pointed. Here is one. “ The old argument from Design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that'fhe law of natnral selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.”3 The fit survive, the unfit perish; and the theologian is eloquent on the successes, and silent on the failures. He marks the hits and forgets the misses. Were nature liable to human penalties she would have been dished long ago; but she works with infinite time and infinite resources, and therefore cannot become bankrupt. Here is a passage from a letter to Miss Julia Wedgwood (July 11, 1861) on the occasion of her article in Macmillan. “ The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is without having been designed; yet, where one would most expect design, namely, in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think the less I can see proof of design.”4 This reminds one of a pregnant utterance of another master-mind. Cardinal Newman says he should be an Atheist if it were not for the voice speaking in his conscience, and exclaims—“ If I looked into a mirror, 3 Vol. I., p. 309. 4 Vol. I., pp. 313, 314. �56 DARAVIN ON GOD. and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which comes upon me when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator.”5 Here is another passage from a letter (July, 1860) to Dr. Asa Gray. “ One word more on ‘ designed laws ’ and 1 undesigned results.’ I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it. I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man ? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If yon believe so, do you believe when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particu­ lar swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant ? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat is designed, I see no reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.”0 Twenty years later, writing to Mr. W. Graham, the author of the Creed of Science, Darwin says, “ There are some points in your book which I cannot digest The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this.” 7 During the last year of his life a very interesting conversation took place between Darwin and the Duke of Argyll. Here is the special part in the Duke’s own words. “ In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable words on ‘ Fer­ tilisation of Orchids ’ and upon ‘ The Earthworms,’ and 5 Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 241. 6 Vol. I., pp. 314, 315. 7 Vol. I., p. 315. �DARWIN ON GOD. 57 various other observations he made of the wonderful con­ trivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impos­ sible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘ it seems to go away.’ ’'8 This is a remarkable story, and the point of it is in the words “ it seems to go away.’; There is nothing extraordinary in the fact that Darwin, who was a Christian till thirty and a Theisttill fifty, should some­ times feel a billow of superstition sweep over his mind. The memorable thing is that at other times his free intellect could not harbour the idea of a God of Nature. The indications of mind in the constitution of the universe were not obvious to the one man living who had studied it most profoundly. Belief in the super­ natural could not harmonis 2 in Darwin’s mind with the facts and conclusions of science. The truth of Evolu­ tion entered it and gradually took possession. Theo­ logy was obliged to leave, and although it returned occasionally, and roamed through its old dwelling, it only came as a visitor, and was never more a resident. DIVINE BENEFICENCE. The problem of how the goodness of God can be reconciled with the existence of evil is at least as old as the Book of Job, and the essence of the problem remains unchanged. Many different solutions have been offered, but the very best is nothing but a 8 Vol. I., p. 816. �58 ' DARWIN ON GOD. plausible compromise. Even the Christian theory of a personal Devil, practically almost as potent as the Deity, ancl infinitely more active, is a miserable make­ shift ; for, on inquiry, it turns out that the Devil is a part of God’s handiwork, exercising only a delegated or permitted power. The usual resort of the theo­ logian when driven to bay is to invoke the aid of “ mystery,’7 but this is useless as against the logician, since “ mystery ” is only a contradiction between the facts and the hypothesis, and the theologian can hardly expect to be saved by what is virtually a plea of “ Guilty.7’ Like every educated and thoughtful man, Darwin was brought face to face with this problem, and he was too honest to twist the facts, and too much a lover of truth and clarity to submerge them in the mysterious. He preferred to speak plainly as far as his intellect carried him, and when it stopped to frankly confess his ignorance. Writing to Dr. Asa Gray (May 22, 1850), Darwin puts a strong objection to Theism very pointedly. “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidse with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not be­ lieving this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of mar, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left �DABWIN ON GOD. 59 to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect.”9 The latter part of this extract about “ designed laws ” is modified by a subsequent letter, already quoted, to the same correspondent. The first part is the one to be dwelt upon in the present connexion. Dealing with the same subject sixteen years later in his Autobiography, Darwin gives his opinion that happiness, on the whole, predominates over misery, although he admits that this ‘f would be very difficult to prove.” He then faces the Theistic aspect of the question. “ That there is much suffering' in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this with reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and they often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. • This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one.”1 Darwin is perfectly conscious that he is advancing no new argument against Theism. An age of micro­ scopical science was, indeed, necessary before the internal parasites of caterpillars could be instanced; not to mention the thirty species of parasites that prey on the human organism. But such larger para­ sites as fleas and lice have always been obvious, and the theologians have been constantly asked why Almighty Goodness prompted Almighty Wisdom to provide humanity with such a sumptuous stock of these nuisances. It may also be observed that while 9 Vol. II., p. 312. 1 Vol. I., p. 311. �60 DARWIX OX GOD. cholera, fever, and other germs, are modern discoveries, such things as tumors, cancers, and leprosy, have always attracted attention, and they are more telling instances of malignant “ design ” than the ichneumonidae in caterpillars, as they immediately affect the gentlemen who carry on the discussion. Darwinism does, however, present the problem of evil in a new light. It shows us that evil is not on the surface of things, but is part of their very texture. Those who complacently dwell on the survival of the fittest, and the forward march to perfection, con­ veniently forget that the survival of the fittest is the result. Natural Selection is the process. And if we look at this more closely we discover that natural selec­ tion and the survival of the fittest are the same thing; the real process being the elimination of the unfit. Those who survive would have lived in any case ; what has happened is that all the rest have been crushed out of existence. Suppose, for instance (to take a case of artificial selection), a farmer castrates nineteen bulls and breeds from the twentieth; it makes a great difference to the result, but clearly the whole of the process is the elimination of the nineteen. Similarly, in natural selection, all organic variations are alike spawned forth by Nature ; the fit are produced and perpetuated, while the unfit are produced and exter­ minated. And hoic exterminated? Not by the swift hand of a skilful executioner, but by countless varieties of torture, some of which display an infernal ingenuity that might abash the deftest Inquisitor. Every disease known to us is simply one of Nature’s devices for eliminating hei’ unsuitable offspring, and a cat’s playing �DARWIN ON GOD. 61 with a mouse is nothing to the prolonged sport of Nature in killing the victims of her own infinite lust of procreation. Place a Deity behind this process, and you create a greater and viler Devil than any theology of the past was capable of inventing. Accept it as the work of blind forces, and you may become a Pessimist if you are disgusted with tlic entire business ; or an Optimist if you are healthy, prosperous and callous ; or a Meliorist if you think evolution tends to progress, and that your own efforts may brighten the lot of your fellows. Darwin put the case too mildly in his first great work. “ When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. ’2 Professor Huxley, in liis vigorous and uncompro­ mising fashion, has put the case with greater foice and accuracy “From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is ;on about the same level as a gladiator’s show, the creatures are fairly well treated, and set to figlit—whereby the strongest, the swiftest and cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarte1' is given. He must admit that the skill and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanguished and victor.’’3 Dr. Wallace, on the other hand, argues that the “ torments ” and “ miseries ” of the lower animals are imaginary, and that “ the amount of actual suffering - Origin of Species, p, Gl. 3 The Struggle for Existence, “ Nineteenth Century,” February, 1888, p-163. �62 DARWIN ON GOD. caused by the struggle for existence among animals is altogether insignificant?' They live merrily, have no apprehensions, and die violent deaths which are “ pain­ less and easy?’ Really the picture is idyllic I But Dr. Wallace’s optimism is far from exhausted. Ide tells us that “ their actual flight from an enemy ” is an “ enjoyable exercise ” of their powers. This reminds one of the old fox-hunter who, on being taxed with enjoying a cruel sport, replied: “ Why the men like it, the horses [like it, the dogs like it, and, demmc, the fox likes it too.” RELIGION AND MORALITY. Darwin was, of course, a naturalist in ethics, holding 1 hat morality is founded on sympathy and the social instincts. There is no more solid and satisfactory account of the genesis and development of conscience than is to be found in the chapter on “ The Moral Sense ” in the Descent of Man. I do not think-, how­ ever, that he had given much attention to the relations between morality and religion, but what he says is of course entitled to respect. “ With the more civilised races,” he declares, “ the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality?’4 He speaks of “ the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God,”5 and again of “the grand idea of a God hating sin and loving righteousness.”c These are casual opinions, never in any case elaborated, so that we cannot tell on what grounds Darwin held 1 Descent of Man, p. 612. 5 Ibid, p. 93. « Ibid, p. 144. �63 DARWIN ON GOD. them. One would have liked to hear his opinion as to how many people were habitually swat ed bt this “ grand idea” of God. AGNOSTICISM AND ATHEISM. ' My views are not at all necessarily atheistical, wrote Darwin in 1860 to Dr. Asa Gray.7 In the same strain he wrote to Mr. Fordyce in 1879 : “ What my own views may he is a question of no conse­ quence to anyone but myself. But, as you ask, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates. ... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” s Similarly, he closes a lengthy passage of his Auto­ biography—“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us ; and I for one must be con­ tent to remain an Agnostic.”9 Let us here recur to the conversation between Darwin and Dr. Biichner, reported by Dr. Aveling. Darwin “ held the opinion that the Atheist was a denier of God,” and this is borne out by the extract just given from his letter to Mr. Fordyce. His two guests explained to him that the Greek prefix a was privative not negative, and that an Atheist was simply a person without God. Darwin agreed with them on every point, and said finally, “ I am with you in thought, but I should prefer the word Agnostic to the word Atheist.” They suggested that Agnostic was Atheist “ writ respectable,” and Atheist was Agnostic “ writ 7 Vol. II., p. 312. 8 Vol. I., p. 305. s Vol. I., p. 313. �64 DARWIN ON GOD. aggressive?’ At which he smiled, and asked, “ Whyshould you be so aggressive ? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of man­ kind t It is all very well for educated, cultured, thoughtful people ; but are the masses yet ripe for it ?”1 Mr. Francis Darwin does not dispute this report. “ My father’s replies implied his preference for the unaggressive attitude of an Agnostic. Dr. Aveling seems to regard the absence of aggressiveness in my father’s views as distinguish­ ing them in an unessential manner from his own. But, in my judgment, it is precisely differences of this kind which dis­ tinguish him so completely from the class of thinkers to which Dr. Aveling belongs.” 2 This is amusing but not convincing ; indeed, it gives up the whole point at issue. Mr. Francis Darwin simply confirms all that Dr. Aveling said. The great naturalist was not aggressive, so he preferred A gnostic to Atheist; but as both mean exactly the same, essen­ tially, the difference is not one of principle, but one of policy and temperament. Darwin prided himself on having “ done some service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations”® Had he gone more into the world, and seen the evil effects of other dogmas, he might have sympathised more with the aggressive attitude of those who challenge Theology in toto as the historic enemy of liberty and progress. This at least is certain, that Charles Darwin, the supreme biologist of his age, and the greatest scientific intellect since Newton, was an Atheist in the only proper sense of the word ; the sense supported by etymology, the sense accepted by those who bear the name. 1 Dr. Aveling’s pamphlet, p. 5. 2 Life and Letters, vol. i., p. 817. 3 Descend of Man, p, 61. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Progressive Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1889 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N236 Subject The topic of the resource God Evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Darwin on God), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Charles Darwin Evolution-Religious Aspects-Christianity God NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/19e44de08c029de0973a92298f0280c2.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=CTZSt73ItjMcb%7EnoTR3Sk1AUR5K8eRGrJSEwSEUq32vm8XCD50XwjpH%7E5Bjs3e2GFkusqP2w0%7EKi%7EDw1pvoAYoPVXUjBTtFf69vx34E4TGSQMME246vyyHoc1g12JEE1StuWYQL59PSaHg7wfiUgQKGf8MaEX8lprJvz3y-qqZX1QpSNmoVfzN9Fk928pk569u3Zhj4Cbn8pcgHHf2xtWyR7AaxTe1H64bv19nJQTWSM3QzIfu5nnh%7E3rFqVgFN2AekfBrdZty%7E-koLud2OKss0EoGe5DwOmz6t9IVS6sVanTs7ja1XZKv0hY5-Za4cA%7EE-MeDWLy62dBXrNGWC2EA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM bb452f8d4ecc0f7d7d4428153e29590d PDF Text Text jTfte Atfreistic ^Uniform III. THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. BY EDWARD B. AVELING, D.Sc. LONDON: freethought publishing 63,_ FLEET STREET E.C. 1 8 8 4. PRICE ONE PENNY. COMPANY, �THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. ------------- ♦------------- Under this title it is proposed to issue a fortnightly publi­ cation, each number of which shall consist of a lecture delivered by a well-known Freethought advocate. Any question may be selected, provided that it has formed the subject of a lecture delivered from the platform by an Atheist. It is desired to show that the Atheistic platform is used for the service of humanity, and that Atheists war against tyranny of every kind, tyranny of king and god, political, social, and theological. Each issue will consist of sixteen pages, and will be published at one penny. Each writer is .responsible only for his or her own views. \ I. “ What is the Use of Prayer ?” By Annie Besant. II. “ Mind considered as a Bodily’ Function.” Alice Bradlaugh. By �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. A new and better Gospel is now preached to men. That which has for a long time gone by the name of Gospel (good news) is neither news nor good. It is not news, for it has been preached for nearly nineteen centuries. Not that length of time alone could make it old and effete. But the Gospel of Christianity has not within itself that inherent and strong life of reality which makes even old truths to have a perennial freshness, an eternal youth. Nor is the Gospel of Christianity good. In the tales that it tells us of the past, in the advice that it gives us for the present,, and in the hopes and threats it holds out for the fixture, it is a misleading guide, a poor philosopher, a false friend. The legends have it that on the coming of the central figure of the discredited evangel the angels sang together : “Peace on earth, good will to men.” It was a false alarm. Neither peace nor good will Was forthcoming. But with the advent of this scientific gospel, the Gospel of Evolution, comes the possibility of “striking a universal peace through sea and land,” the possibility of the uni­ versal brotherhood of man. Perhaps we are all of us too anxious and too hopeful in the feeling that some one idea will save the world. The religious creeds of different races and times are the expres­ sion of this anxiety. We that have rejected all belief in the supernatural must take care that the same fancy that has spoilt the lives of so many does not mar our own. We must have a care lest we make too much of some truth ? • �36 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. even though it be a scientific conclusion, based on scientific observation and reasoning. And we must not forget that, of all the great generalisations, that of Evolution is the one most likely to be thus regarded, for it is a generalisation of generalisations. The mind of man is always longing for some solid resting-place. Man wants to get back and back, to something certain. He wants to feel that, what­ ever happens, some one great principle stands fast. The children of the decrepit gospel dreamed that this was found in God. The children of the new Gospel know that in the indestructibility of matter and of motion, and in the infinite nature of the transformations of matter and motion, they have a solid fact on which to fall back when all else fails. Only it is very important to remember that, great as any idea may be, the mental effort needed for its under­ standing and its acquisition is to the individual of as much moment as the idea itself. The exercise of our faculties is of as great value to us as the results attained by the exercise. The old parental habit of asking of the school­ boy or the school-girl : “What prizes have you gained ? ” is only one form of a general error. The question is not, ‘ ‘ What prizes have you ? ’ ’ but ‘ ‘ What have you learned ? ’ ’ We are doming to recognise this in some measure in our estimates of grown men and women. Still, however, to the vulgar, the measure of a man is the banker’s balance. But the thoughtful, as yet few in number, although the number grows hourly, and even the commonplace people, if they are in the unaccustomed atmosphere of culture, are estimating the value of a human being by that which he actually does and is, rather than by the magnitude of the cheques he can draw. What is, then, this Evolution ? In the asking this ques­ tion and in the attempt to answer we see how much happier is the position of the new gospel as compared with that of the old. The good news of Christianity, having no scien­ tific and indeed no natural basis, has been Protean in its forms. These have been indefinitely varied according to the taste and fancy of the age and of the individual. The Gospel as preached by Messrs. Benson, Booth, Baldwin Brown, Spurgeon, Liddon, Moody, is somewhat mixed. But the new evangel is founded wholly on a natural and scientific basis. There may be slight differences of opinion as to matters of detail among its apostles and its disciples, �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. 37 but the fundamental principles are accepted by all. Upon these, no doubt, much less any dispute reigns. Evolution is the name for the idea of the unity and con­ tinuity of phenomena. The popular and unscientific notion was that there was not only an original effort on the part of the supernatural causing the natural, setting it going, in fact, but a continual interposition of the super­ natural from without, controlling the natural. Evolution is the doctrine of non-intervention. According to this gospel, matter and motion are all in all. Matter is the convenient name for all that which can affect the senses of man. Motion is change of place, whether it be of large, palpable masses, as when the arm is raised, or of minute impalpable molecules, as when heat or electricity is at work. The ordinary notion of movement is wholly confined to that which, is called molar, that is, the motion of masses. Moles=a mass. Thus the movements of a running man, or of a football when kicked, or of a railway train when the engine draws it along, are all cases of molar motion. But a finer kind of movement has of late years come within the ken of mankind. It has been at work probably eternally. It is molecular movement, or movement of small masses. But only very recently has the mind of man been able to take cognisance of this form. The researches of the physicists, the chemists, the biologists have demonstrated that there is a whole world of move­ ments that affect only the minute particles of bodies. Thus heat is a mode of motion; electricity is another; magnetism is a third. The familiar phsenomena of light are no longer regarded as due to any actual matter that has been thrown from a luminous body. They are the result of waves of a fluid imponderable and universal called ether, and there seems every reason to believe that the phsenomena commonly called vital are of the same or of a kindred order. Life, it would appear, is but a mode of motion. And though we know life generally only by its manifestations of molar motion, as in the blow of the arm, or the stride of the leg, yet these massive movements are but the outward representatives of a large number of internal movements, of chemical nature in digestion, of ner­ vous nature in the sense-organs and nerve tissues. Every bodily movement visible to the ordinary eye is only the �38 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. obverse aspect of many molecular motions, not as yet visible to man. The reasons why we regard matter and motion as allsufficient in the explanation of all the phenomena of the universe are several. In the first place, no destruction of matter has ever been witnessed. Second, no destruction of motion has ever been witnessed. The creation of either matter or motion has been equally unseen. Transformations of matter from one of its infinitely many forms to some other are constantly visible, and they are always unat­ tended by the smallest increase or diminution in the actual quantity of matter. So also with motion—transformations without any change in quantity are continually occurring. Thus, we see the rocks disintegrated by the action of rain and running water, “weathered” by the action of the air. We see the matter of which they consisted worn away and carried down by streams and rivers to be de­ posited at the mouths of rivers or on the beds of seas. Or we set fire to a candle and watch its matter combining with the matter of the air to form the products of combustion, carbon, dioxide, steam, and their fellows. Or a dead animal or plant is seen to decay slowly into these same gases that the burning candle gives forth and into certain inorganic salts. And these are all cases of the transforma­ tion of matter without any creation or destruction. Or we see the molar motion of a student’s hands bringing together some acid and two metals. At once chemical action, a form of molecular motion, is set up. The molar motion of hands, a piece of silk, and a glass rod results in electricity, a mode of molecular motion. Or we apply heat, a mode of molecular motion, to a bar of metal which expands, to a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen which unite chemically. Or to a crystal of tourma­ line, one end of which becomes positively electric, the other negatively. These are all cases of the transformation of motion without any creation or destruction. In all these cases the amount of matter and the amount of motion remain unchanged. Only the quantities of particular kinds vary. The generalisation that the quantity of matter and motion in the universe is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, appears to be thoroughly established. More than this. Not only is there no scientific basis what­ ever for the fancy of a creation or of a destruction of matter �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. 39 or of motion. The fancy is unthinkable. No human mind is capable of picturing to itself the passage from the material to the immaterial, the moment of time in which the non-universe began to be the universe. Yet again. Up to the present time every explanation of every pheenomenon of the universe has been in terms of matter and of motion. The law of gravitation, Kepler’s three great generalisations in astronomy, the phenomena of attraction and repulsion in electrified and magnetised bodies, the nature of chemical elements and compounds, the relation between plants and animals in regard to their effect on the air, the principles of variation, of natural selection, of heredity, of adaptation—these and thousands of other truths that unseal our eyes to the beautiful mean­ ing of nature, are all explanations as to how certain forms of matter are in certain states of motion. And if up to the present hour all the explanations that have been forth­ coming of natural things are in terms of the natural, we are entitled to conclude that all explanations hereafter will be in kindred terms. Or we may look on the question in another way. In the days of man’s greater ignorance everything was primarily or ultimately referred to the supernatural. All phenomena were at first directly due to the action of the supernatural. But, as time and knowledge advanced, these references grew fewer and fewer in number. They were replaced by perfectly natural explanations of events, and we are entitled to believe that this process of elimination has now gone on sufficiently far for us to hold that since super­ naturalism is unnecessary for the primary explanation of phaenomena, it is also unnecessary for their ultimate explanation. From all that I have just said it will be understood that the Gospel of Evolution has a wider significance than popu­ lar notions imply. The general idea as to Evolution, that it is synonymous with Darwinism, is not accurate. The Darwinian teaching is only a part, though in one sense it is the most important part, of the Evolution truth. Evolu­ tion itself means, as we have seen, the unity of phsenomena. All things are, according to this new principle, one huge continuity. Whilst Darwinism shows that man is not distinct from the lower animals, and that all species of animals, and all species of plants are artificial groups 4 �40 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. gliding one into the other, just as in their gradual de­ velopment they glided one out of the other, Evolution goes further than this and does not fare worse. For the evolutionist not only believes that which the works of Darwin have made an assured truth, but he believes that plants and animals have had a common parentage, that living matter has originated from the non-living, that there has been no break in the vast series of phenomena at any point. Some of the general grounds for this belief have been /ven. Let us look rapidly at some of the more special. The principle of - the conservation of energy already men­ tioned indirectly is, in a sense, the starting point of thought on this subject. Grove’s essay on the “Correla­ tion of the Physical Forces,” published a few years since, was the first clear enunciation of the generalisation towards which so many observations had led. When he reminded men that chemical action, electricity, heat, sound, light, magnetism, and life were all convertible, one into the other, and thus convertible in definite numerical proportions, mathematically calculable, the keynote of the idea of Evolution had been struck. Harsh as it may seem, an idea in any branch of know­ ledge has never attained a sure basis until it is expressible in terms of mathematics. There was a time when physics and chemistry were divorced from mathematics to a large extent. Now even the phenomena of electricity and the reactions one upon another of chemical bodies are expressed in algebraical formulae. This is the result of the increased precision of our knowledge. Following in the footsteps of physics and chemistry the biological sciences are becoming every day more mathematical. We have formulae to express the manner of the arrangement of leaves upon a stem, the manner of arrangement of the parts of a flower. One of these days every structural and functional fact in regard to every living thing will be related to some formula of mathematics more or less general. We shall not all become martinets or dryasdusts. There is a beauty in exactness. I sometimes think that the difference between the loveliness of our thinking and of our dreaming on natural phenomena, as compared with that which the older thinkers and dreamers enjoyed, will be as the difference between the joy of a game of chess between skilled players �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. t , 41 or between those that know not even the moves. The child pushes the kings and queens and rooks and knights and bishops and pawns about at random, and laughs gaily. But the master of the game, moving them according to definite rules, obtains a far higher enjoyment, and produces a combination that has its poetry. The very sciences that deal with these different modes of matter and motion are now by no means as clearly marked off one from another as their earlier students thought they were. Physics, chemistry, geology, botany, zoology, anatomy, physiology, how they all dovetail into, or actually overlap each other. It is impossible to say sometimes to which domain of science a particular fact belongs. The distinctions between the physical and the chemical properties of bodies are confessedly artificial. Botany implies a study’of the anatomy and the physiology of plants. Physiology in its turn becomes only a question of chemistry; -its phenomena are becoming reduced to mathematical expressions. We are learning to calculate the actual amount of work done in the performance of different functions of the living body, in the same terms as we calculate the work done by a steam engine. The respiratory organs or the muscular during the day do so many foot-pounds of work. The foot-pound is the unit of measurement employed in the study of work. Work is done when matter is moved through space. The foot­ pound is the amount of work done when the mass of a pound is raised one foot against the gravitation attraction of the earth. A steam-engine does per day a certain number of foot-pounds of work. Its capacity for work is usually expressed by saying that it is so many horse power. One horse power is equivalent to 33,000 foot­ pounds per minute. The physiologists are, by means of very intricate and careful calculations, enabled to calculate with ever - increasing accuracy the equivalent in foot­ pounds, i.e., the mechanical equivalent, of each of the body functions of the average man per diem. If we turn to any of the special sciences the same dove­ tailing and over-lapping appear. In chemistry it is difficult to mark off any group of bodies from all other groups. The three sets of bodies that chemistry is supposed to study are elements, mixtures, and compounds. An element such as carbon or gold, is a body which has not yet been �42 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. decomposed. A mixture is that which results from putting together two or more substances, without those substances undergoing any change of properties. Thus brandy and water, or gunpowder is a mixture. The properties of the brandy and of the water in the one case, and of the char­ coal, nitre and sulphur in the other, are unchanged. A compound is the result of the union of two or more elements with change of properties; thus water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and its properties are those of neither hydrogen nor oxygen. The fundamental distinc­ tion supposed to be at the basis of all chemical study, that between elements and compounds, is found to be in­ applicable when we study such bodies as cyanogen, a com­ pound of the two elements carbon and nitrogen, that behaves like an element. Ammonium, a compound of four atoms of hydrogen and one of nitrogen, also behaves like an element, taking the place of such metallic elements as potassium or sodium. In fact all the so-called ‘ ‘ com­ pound radicles ” which enter so largely into our study of organic chemistry are groups of two or atoms of two or more elements that behave as simple bodies. The metals and the non-metals are connected by such forms as arsenic or selenium, placed by one chemist among the metals, by another among the non-metals. Hydrogen, usually classed with the non-metals, has the power of replacing metallic elements. It does this so persistently ihat, on theoretical grounds, chemists had long spoken of hydrogen as probably essentially a metal. When the French chemist Pictet succeeded in liquefying hydrogen, until then only known in the gas form, the liquid fell upon the floor of the laboratory with a metallic ring. And who is to say posi­ tively whether an alloy of copper and zinc is to be regarded as a mixture or as a compound of the two metals ? Still more important is the bridging over the supposed gulf between the inorganic and the organic chemical sub­ stances. A few years back this gulf was supposed to be great, fixed, impassable. The mineral*or inorganic was makable by man. The organic was not, and never would be. The chemist might go on continually manufacturing hydrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide, ammonia. But he was never to hope to make alcohol, sugar, urea, any of the multitudinous substances called organic. And now all this folly of forbidding is at an end. The organic bodies are �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. 43 manufactured by man. The inorganic and the organic are no more regarded as clearly distinguishable. Even the chemistry books by their very titles recognise and proclaim this fact. We have no longer works on organic chemistry. We have volumes on the chemistry of carbon compounds. In geology the different kinds of rocks graduate into each other. Between the aqueous, or sedimentary, and the igneous, or those due to the action of fire, range the metamorphic, i.e., sedimentary rocks that have been after­ wards subjected to heat. The various systems of sedi­ mentary rocks are known now to be purely artificial if convenient divisions. From the Laurentian up to the recent rocks there has never been any real hiatus. No­ where is there the slightest evidence of pause or of recom­ mencement. Our groups are artificial. Nature is like Gallio and cares for none of these things. Whilst rocks thus glide one into the other, the fossil remains that they contain do likewise. If the view of the special creationist were accurate we ought to find isolated forms of dead animals and plants, we ought to find sudden appearances in the rocks of forms not allied to these already encountered, we ought not necessarily to find a series of organic remains ascending in complexity of structure. If the view of the evolutionist is accurate, we ought to find no . forms of dead animals or plants isolated ; we ought never to find a form appearing without preliminary heralds of its coming in the shape of kindred forms; we ought to find a series of organic remains whose later members are in ad­ vance of the earlier. These latter expectations are realised. In like manner the gap supposed to exist between the kingdoms of the non-living and living is closing up. As long as men had only studied the higher forms of living things there was no difficulty in defining and distinguishing living organisms. To define and to distinguish the lowest forms of those now known is impossible. IIow completely this is true can only be understood by those who have studied the protoplasmic masses that hover on the border line between the organic and the inorganic. But even the unskilled in microscopic work will be able to grasp some- , thing of the great truth if they will take the trouble to look up the innumerable 'definitions of life that have been given by various persons, and note how unsatisfactory, how contradictory and often self-contradictory they are. �44 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. If we pass up into the kingdoms of the living, and study­ plants and animals, the same unity of phsenomena meets us. Our classification terms—order, genus, species, and so forth—are as artificial as our names for the geological systems. No one holds to-day that any single species is clearly marked off from all others. Connecting links abound in our vegetable kingdom. The lichens, long regarded as a separate class of lowly organised plants are now known to be fungi that are parasitic upon algae. The higher cryptogams or flowerless plants are found to be at one in their structure and functions with the lower phsenogams or flowering plants. The distinctions between plants and animals are found to have vanished. Once again it is easy enough to dis­ tinguish high plants from high animals.. But no man can satisfactorily draw the line between the lower members of the two kingdoms. The old definitions of the animal and the plant given with a suicidal glibness in old books on botany and zoology, when tried in the balance of criticism, are found wanting. Even the food-distinction, supposed to be the best distinction between the two groups, fails. It is no longer true that plants feed on the inorganic, and animals on organic substances. The cases of vegetable parasites and of insectivorous plants give a direct contra­ diction to this statement. And it is very interesting to notice how gradual are the transitions in this as m all cases. A group of plants known as saprophytes, that feed on decay­ ing organic things, is the natural transition between the ordinary plants that eat inorganic food-stuffs, and those plants that, like animals, exist on organic substances. So marked is this difficulty of distinguishing between the lower plants and the lower animals, that it has been sug­ gested that a third kingdom of the living should be con­ structed midway .between the two generally recognised. This is to be called Protista, and is to include all the doubtful forms that are not clearly members either of the Kingdom Animalia or of the Kingdom Vegetabilia. . If the arbitrary nature of all our systems of classifica­ tion is understood, this new division will do little harm. But for the systematist the difficulty is by the establish­ ment of this group only doubled. Heretofore he had only to struggle over a particular living thing, with the view to determine whether it were plant or animal. Now he will �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLI/TION. 45 have to struggle over it with the view of telling whether it is Protistic or animal, or Protistic or vegetable. But the true evolutionist will only look on the group of the Protista as containing forms that represent the parent con­ dition of both vegetables and animals. The animal kingdom, no less than the vegetable, gives these results. Amphioxus, the little Mediterranean fish, links the Vertebrata, or back-boned animals, for ever on to the Invertebrata. The classes of the Vertebrate sub­ kingdom have their connecting links or intermediate forms. These classes, adopting for popular exposition the old ■classification, are the Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, Mammalia.' Whilst Amphioxus at the lower end of the class of fishes connects these with the soft-bodied animals, or Mollusca, at the upper end of the Pisces, we have the Lepidosiren, or mud-fish. It is impossible to say whether this animal is more of a fish or a reptile. With limbs rather than fins, with three cavities to its heart, and a swim­ bladder that acts as a lung, it has yet so many parts of its anatomy that are piscine as to lead Professor Huxley still to place it as a solitary representative of the highest order ■of Pisces. The class Amphibia is itself a confirmation of the general truth, for its members, such as the frogs, are in their early condition fish, and in their adult state reptiles. Ptero­ dactyl of the Jurassic strata is the winged lizard. Its name tells us that we have a form intermediate be­ tween the classes Reptilia and Aves. The duck-billed Platypus, or Ornithorhyncus, of Australia, is a furred mammal that suckles its young, and yet has a bird’s bill, a bird’s feet, a bird’s wishing-bone, a bird’s heart, a bird’s alimentary canal. If we turn to the individual classes, the same thing obtains. To take but the the highest class, the Prosimise, or half-apes, among the Mammalia are an order, that stands centrally to the Insectivora, Rodentia, Cheirop­ tera, and Primates. There is no gap between man and the rest of the Primates. Not a single mark of anatomy, of physiology, or of psychology, clearly distinguishes man from the highest apes. If we study the individual animal, the same fact of the unity of phsenomena is again borne in upon us. The bodily functions are by no means so distinct in their nature as we were wont to think. To take but an illustration. �46 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. The sense-organs of man are all found to be only so many modifications of the integument. The skin or tactile organ is the integument. The tongue or taste organ is but the integument folded inwards and a little modified. The nasal cavities are also lined with a modification of the same tissue, and even the most complex sense organs that are at tho same time the most important —that is the eye and the ear—are, as the study of develop­ ment or embryology shows us, only the result of a series of remarkable changes affecting certain parts of the epidermis of the animal. Those physiological functions of the human body that appeal’ to be clearly marked off are really not completely demarcated. Take as example the excretory action of the skin, lungs, and the renal organs. The lungs get rid especially of carbon dioxide; the skin of water ; the renal organs of the products of nitrogenous decay. But each of these organs also eliminates those products which are eliminated by the other two. Thus the lungs, whilst they get rid principally of carbon dioxide, also get rid of water in the form of steam and of nitrogenous matter. The skin gives off a certain quantity of carbon dioxide and nitrogen excreta. And the renal organs also eliminate all three of the chief forms of excretory matter. When any one of these three organs is not functioning at its best, extra work is thrown upon the others, and' in some extreme cases this metastasis, or transference of function, is very remarkable. Thus an ulcer in the human body has been known to secrete milk. Try to realise at least something of what all this means. It is no longer possible to mark off clearly the various domains of science. Science is one, for it is the study of nature, and nature is one. In every branch of our know­ ledge that daily grows more unified, the transitions are found to be innumerable and the gradations infinitesimal. Our chemical groups, our geological rocks and strata, our inorganic and organic kingdoms, our plants and animals, our classes, orders, genera, species, all are seen to be artificial. Here is then the new message that science is uttering to man. It is in truth good news. There is no break any­ where. The universe is one vast whole. It is true that at first there seems to be a loss because of the indistinctness �THE GOSPEL OF EVOLUTION. 47 that now veils the old lines of demarcation. At first some­ thing of a shock is felt when we realise that the old definitions and classifications are only matters of con­ venience, and really represent nothing in nature. But our view of the whole gains incomparably. We are led to take a larger and more true conception of the universe. If the subdivisions disappear the unity of the whole comes out with wonderful clearness. We study phenomena from below upwards, and see something more than an unbroken series. We see that actually there is no below and no above. The mineral kingdon of the non-living passes into the living. This by gradual stages of ascent rises to the loftiest forms of plants and animals yet known. But these in their constant decay and in their death once for all as individuals, return to the mineral kingdom again. If only we grasp the full meaning of this new gospel founded on science, all life acquires a new significance. Most of all our own life, as the highest expression known to us of the phenomena of matter in motion, becomes more solemn and more full of hope. In it more than in any other are gathered together the forces of the universe. The attraction of the stone for the planet, and of the particles of rock one for another, the loves and hates of chemical atoms, the energies of electrified and magnetised bodies, the variations of innumerable simpler forms of organisms, long chains of heredity reaching back through incalculable times, myriads of adaptations, struggles and failures, deaths and lives, all have met in us. We, more than all others, are the heirs of the ages. While our less fortunate brethren, the lower animals, the plants, the minerals, are playing their good part in the universal history, without the consciousness in full of the meaning of it all, we read the signs of the past and of to-day. “We know what we are, but we know not what we may be,” in all the detail that our children’s children will see and live. Yet we know that the race has a future that will transcend its past, as that past transcended the dark dumb lives of the ancestry whence our kind has sprung. The Gospel of Evolution is replacing that of Chris­ tianity. Science is taking the place of Religion and yielding to mankind the poetry that its forerunner missed. Nature is our all in all. Only the whisper of a secret thought here and there of hers has yet reached our ears. But �48 THE ATHEISTIC PLATFORM. every sound of her voice, faint or thunderous, tells us that the supernatural is worse than doomed. It does not exist. The preachers of this new gospel are nature herself and all her children. Thus the history of man, all science, all human lives, we that live and love, are the apostles of the new evangel. And its temples, marred as they are in some instances by the worship now and again of the dead god, are the halls of universities, the state-schools, the science classes for our young men and maidens, the laboratories and the studies of the philosophers, the hearts of all that seek for truth. Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, at 63, Fleet Street, London, E.C.—1884. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The gospel of evolution Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Aveling, Edward B. [1849-1898] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: [35]-48 p. ; 18 cm. Series title: Atheistic Platform Series number: 3 Notes: Through-pagination with other pamphlets in Atheistic Platform series. List of other titles in the series inside front cover. Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, 63 Fleet Street, E.C. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Freethought Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1884 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N1510 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The gospel of evolution), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Evolution (Biology) NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/3500fcb0ae3c7d1b44ec358c59d54289.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=DN3FeCZC5LXV0btXdwOLXBnO4KhEmb2%7ETaBELKSUatCkMpzf5L%7ED12NGuVlVQ7buMGiDJzLwEBo8NtWPnOwuVVQE029spvHGe5BCN6D53Fu2kpbs6Ay3Q6BBqKoKSy76zkWQcKnHjvVnBsDLBdvXVyOZGP0HXnprbDOnasN1W2uXHe7v5wLBNLRRnEEOmK%7E3VG3XwD3WI4lC%7EuJBqBnfd76u3Nq-gvm%7E%7ECWsNbZwHsOK2ADlQksccNVjIhG60H7HLQGBeF2CP-4nNVzpT4RzkPVCEBVh4hIJ70%7ErBZdK74e1NX%7ETWRAR8K4B1Fw8woy6uU7RspsfYVqTnfwB14ZCMQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 590cbf5b57813ea87bb1cbf8443a2c24 PDF Text Text DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. BY FREDERICK MILLAR. ISSUED FOR THE London WATTS & CO., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET St. 1 Price One Penny. ��DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. Previous to the year 1859 the state of scientific opinionupon the process of development of the organic world, was one of chaos; men of science were groping in thedark. Everyone who rejected the special creation hypo­ thesis found himself in the curious predicament of being, unable to propose anything in the shape of a theory which would be acceptable to reasoning minds. Tothe question asked of the Rationalist by the believer in special creation, “ What have you to propose that can. be accepted by any cautious reasoner ?” no satisfactory answer could be given. Professor Huxley says that in 1857 he had no answer ready, and he does not think any one else had. * Darwin came, and there was light. -- From his quiet Kentish home he launched upon an astonished world “ The Origin of Species.” The book was a beacon fire, dispelling the darkness and guiding the benighted. Throughout the world it shone, illumining the minds of men with rays of scientific thought. - During the thirty years which have elapsed since the publication of “ The Origin of Species”—since the phi­ losophy of Evolution presented itself as claimant to, and seated itself upon, “ the throne of the world of thought ”—a most remarkable and far-reaching change has taken place in the religious views of the thinking section of Christendom. Indeed, history affords no parallel to the great revolution in religious thought which has been effected by Darwinism. But yesterday the creation story in Genesis was accepted even by educated �2 DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. men as unquestionably true; to-day it is regarded as an ex­ ploded legend. But yesterday a belief in the government of the world by a special providence received an all but universal consent; to-day it is rejected by every thought­ ful man as a worthless dogma. But yesterday the timehonoured argument from design in nature satisfied the majority of thinking people; to-day, in the light of the law of natural selection, it completely fails to do so. But yesterday God was conceived to be a terrestrial potentate who governed the world in accordance with his own caprice, who moved “....... in a mysterious way His wonders to perform,” and who listened to and answered prayer; to-day God is the inscrutable power by which “ planets gravitate and stars shine,” who moves in fixed and immutable natural laws, and who heeds neither the cry of the oppressed and the down-trodden, the starving widow and her orphans, nor the death agony of the countless millions of creatures who perish annually in the in­ exorable struggle for existence which is going on in the animal world. It is quite true that many persons, indeed the majority, calling themselves religious continue to believe in the superstition and the dogma which Darwinism has ex­ ploded. By far the larger proportion of those who make up the various sects and denominations in Christendom are of the unthinking class. Born of Christian parents in a country where Christianity is the popular religion, they are Christian for just the same reason that they would have been Mohammedan had they been born in Turkey, Brahman if in Hindustan, Confucian if in China. Their so-called belief in the Christian faith is due solely to geographical antecedents, and not to any well-reasoned conviction. They never think, study, or inquire for themselves, but remain content in their own ignorance, and satisfied with their own credulity. Those of their co-religionists who do think for themselves inev­ itably become heterodox upon most, if not upon all, of the points of Christianity. And nothing has had such a vast and stimulating effect upon the minds of the thoughtful members of Christian sects, nothing has so �DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 3 largely contributed t© the swelling of the ranks of hete­ rodoxy, as the theory discovered and popularised by Darwin, and which bears his name. Anterior to Darwin the belief that species were realities, that the various forms of animal and plant life had always been as distinct and separate as they are now, and that all originated by special creation, was held firmly on every hand. Man was regarded as a creature apart by himself; and the human family was believed to be a separate family. Christians believed that, at a period not more remote than six thousand years, Jehovah, the tribal deity of the Jews, had devoted a week to creating all things. He said, “ Let us make man ;” and he made man “ of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” To disbelieve the account of creation given by Moses was at once a crime and a blasphemy, punishable by imprisonment, at one time death, in this world, and eternal damnation in the next. But what a change has taken place ! The whole scien­ tific and literary world, which held a belief in special creation in common with the religious world, even the whole educated public, now accepts, says Dr. Wallace, “ as a matter of common knowledge, the origin of species from other allied species by the ordinary process of natural birth. The idea of special creation or any alto­ gether exceptional mode of production is absolutely extinct.”* Man and all the higher forms of life upon our globe are simply the modified descendants of lower forms. The belief that man was created in the image of God, that he was aboriginally placed at the top of the organic scale, and that God gave to him dominion over the whole animal world, can no longer be held by anyone who desires to be considered educated. The relation of man to what is vulgarly termed the brute creation has been so conclusively established as to completely dispose of every argument advanced in favour of his divine origin. “ The mode of origin,” says Professor Huxley, “and the early stages of development of man are * “ Darwinism,” p. 9. �4 DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. identical with those of the animals immediately below him in the scale.” The essential features of agreement between the structure of man’s body, the close corres­ pondence of his blood, muscles, nerves, the struc­ ture of his heart, its veins and arteries, his lungs and his whole respiratory and circulatory systems, with those of other mammals; the fact that his senses are identical with theirs, and that his organs of sense are the same in number and occupy the same relative position ; * the possession of rudiments of organs which are fully developed in other mammals ; the fact of certain diseases being common to man and other mammals, and that medical treatment produces precisely the same effect upon us as upon them, thus showing that our whole nervous system is the same as theirs :f these, and a thousand and one equally striking facts given by Darwin, point to but one conclusion—that man, together with the animals which are most nearly allied to him, have descended from a common ancestor. Seeing that Darwinism deliberately cancelled the theo­ logical dogma of creation founded upon the story in Genesis, it would have been strange indeed had not those who were paid to defend it, and the creed of which it is the foundation, assailed it in a manner consistent with the traditions of their cloth. The historic foes of truth did just that which one would expect of them in the circumstances. Powerless to deal with Darwin in true Christian fashion—to throw him into a dungeon as their predecessors did Galileo, or to burn him at the stake as in the case of Giordano Bruno—powerless to con­ fiscate and burn his book, the representatives of mental darkness had to content themselves with making every pulpit in Christendom ring with yells of pious derision. For discovering the law of natural selection, for proving the animal origin of man, Darwin was denounced as a fool and a blasphemer, in just the same way as was Galileo for teaching that the world was round, and that it moved, in opposition to the sanctified ignorance of the Church of Christ, which proclaimed that the world * Wallace’s “ Darwinism,” pp. 445, 446. + “ Descent of Man,” p. 7. �DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 5 was flat and stationary. As Huxley says, the priests and parsons eked out lack of reason by superfluity of railing. The case of the curate who was overheard roundly abusing Darwin and all his works, and who was gsked if he had read “ The Origin of Species,” or had taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the theory he abused, replied, with clasped hands and the whites of his eyes turned in the direction of the empty part of his head, “ No; and I pray to God that I never shall,” is a good sample of Darwin’s clerical opponents. But the yelling and the railing have long ceased. Confronted by unmistakeable evidence that Darwinism was being accepted by all educated people—by all who had brains to think and judgment to decide for them­ selves—its impotent priestly detractors thought it best to see if it were not possible for them to go with the tide, and to patch up their exploded creed in such a manner as to enable them to maintain their dominion over the heads and the pockets of the masses of the people. They have now taken refuge in one of two courses, says Huxley : they either deny that Genesis was meant to teach scientific truth, and thus save the veracity of the record at the expense of its authority; or they expend their energies in devising the crude in­ genuities of the reconciler, and torture texts in the vain hope of making them confess the creed of science. But when the peine forte et dure is over, the antique sincerity of the venerable sufferer always re-asserts itself. Genesis is honest to the core, and professes to be no more than it is—a repository of venerable traditions of unknown origin, claiming no scientific authority, and possessing * none. There is no getting away from the fact that Darwinism has completely exploded the Christian creed. Upon the story in Genesis of man’s creation and fall rests the whole superstructure of the popular religious faith of Europe. The veracity of that story has been impeached, and all history and scientific analogy point to its falsity, .and stamp it as a mere interesting legend, having no * Vide Huxley’s chapter, “ On the Reception of ‘ The Origin of Species,”’ in “ Darwin’s Life and Letters.” �6 DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. further value than to illustrate the manner in which men in the childhood of the human race explained the mystery of existence. Take away the story in Genesis, and the Christian creed becomes at once a huge and ludic­ rous imposture. This fact,'however, is far from being generally realised, even by Darwinians themselves. The writer recently met with a typical illustration of this; An enthusiastic disciple of Darwin was still a member of the sect of Wesleyans, and a regular attendant at. a Wesleyan chapel. On the manifest incongruity of Wesleyanism and Darwinism being pointed out to him —when it was explained to him that, the story of the creation and the fall of man being false, therefore the sacrifice of Jesus as an atonement for a sin which was never committed became a farce, he exclaimed : “ Good heavens! what a fool I have been not to realise this before.” And the following week there was a pew to let in the Wesleyan chapel at which he had been an attendant and a worshipper. It is only by grasping the full significance of Darwin­ ism that its bearing upon Christianity can be understood. There are thousands to-day attending so-called places of“ worship and calling themselves orthodox Christians who, if they would only put this and that together, so to speak, and compare their scientific convictions with their theological preconceptions, would find themselves in the same position as the gentleman referred to above; Take the case of Darwin himself. He tells us that during the years 1836 to 1839 he * was led to think much about religion. When on board the Beagle he was quite orthodox. But he gradually came to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question continually arose in his mind, and would not be banished: Is it credible that, if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This appeared to him incredible. By further reflection upon the matter he saw that the clearest evidence would * “ Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,” vol. i., pp. 304-317. �DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. ■ 7 be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, and that the more men knew of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible miracles became. He saw that the men who wrote the Bible were ignorant and credulous to a degree ; that the gospels upon which the Christian Church placed so much reliance could not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events; and that they differed in many important details—far too important, it seemed to him, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye­ witnesses. And by such reflections as these, he adds, “ I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a Divine revelation.” It may be well to point out here that the oft-repeated statement, that Darwin was an Atheist, is untrue. There is not the smallest ground upon which to justify such a statement being made. Darwin was never an Atheist, in the sense of denying the existence of a God. His attitude towards the question of God was identical with that of all the leading men in science and philosophy of the present century : it was Agnostic. “ The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us,” said he; “ and I, for one, must be content to remain an Agnostic.” He had no sympathy with the intellectually unsustainable theory of Atheism, and said : “ An Agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” Again : “ The whole subject of the existence of God is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.” Darwinism is not Atheistic, as it is often alleged to be. It is not even antagonistic to Theism, except in so far as it exposes the absurdity of the theological aspect of that theory. Moreover, it may be urged that Dar­ winism, although essentially Agnostic in regard to the nature and attributes of God, is distinctly Theistic in character, inasmuch as Darwinians, with few and for the most part unimportant exceptions, hold that the process of evolution is the way in which God (the in­ scrutable power which the universe manifests to us) has made things come to pass, and has brought forth man as the highest and noblest specimen of its handiwork. The effect which Darwinism has had upon the central �8 DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. and vital point of Christianity—the immortality of man’s soul—is enormous. Theology and metaphysics, both regarding man as a special creation, as a being with a distinct nature and attributes, had done something more than merely affirm the immortality of the soul: they had insisted upon it as the greatest of facts. That God had revealed a future life for man was no more doubted than was the veracity of the multiplication-table. But in this belief Darwinism does not share. Regard­ ing man in his real character, as a highly-developed animal, whose moral and intellectual attributes are simply the result of evolution, Darwinism holds out not even the shadow of a hope that there is anything in the shape of a conscious existence beyond the grave. Indeed, the trend of scientific thought upon the question is distinctly in the direction of declaring the doctrine of a future life to be at once inconceivable and insup­ portable. There are, it is true, many believers in Darwinism ' who refuse to accept what is called the Materialistic view of man’s destiny—that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body. Assuming a purpose in the world— and the assumption is one not necessarily incongruous with the doctrine of Evolution—they refuse to believe that the work which has been done in evolving man “has been done for nothing;” they refuse, as Professor Fiske puts it, “ to regard the Creator’s work as like that of a child who builds houses of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them downand, although they admit that, for aught Science can tell us, it may be so, yet they “ see no good reason for believing any such thing.”* It must not be understood that Darwinism sanctions a denial of the immortality of the soul. It only renders it impossible to dogmatise upon either one or the other side of the question. As for a revelation, that may be dismissed as no longer worthy of serious argument, or of the attention of serious minds. But “ as for a future life,” says Darwin, “everyman must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities,” No one can * “ Man’s Destiny,” p. 114. �DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 9 reasonably object to a man believing in the immortality of the soul (that is to say, believing that he believes in the immortality of the soul; for belief properly so-called in such a thing is absolutely impossible) so long as he does not insist upon his “belief” being regarded as anything more than a mere act of faith. The attitude of the intellectual mind upon the question must ever remain one of agnosticism. If Darwinism has robbed man of his hope in a future life, it has more than compensated him in that it has given to him a higher hope and a deeper interest in the present life. It has effectually disposed of the theo­ logical dogma of man’s fall—a dogma which was a wretched libel on humanity; and it has convinced man that he is a risen and not a fallen creature, a re­ generate and not a degenerate being. It has made him feel that human progress is not a miserable sham, but a grand reality; and it has shown to him a nobler view of human existence, and given to him the promise of a higher destiny in the future. This essay ought not to close without reference being made to the new conception of morality introduced by Darwinism. Morality is so closely identified with re­ ligion, if indeed it may not be regarded as inseparable from religion (using the term “ religion ” in its widest sense), that it would be strange if the totally-changed conception of man’s place in nature should not have produced along with it a corresponding change in man’s conception of conduct. The theological conception of morality, a conception ■which was general before the Darwinian era, was that all human conduct must be regulated in accordance with the will of a supposed Deity as declared in the Bible. All mankind were inherently depraved in consequence of Adam, the first man, disobeying Jehovah’s command. And the conduct of every man and woman must be directed, not towards pleasing themselves, not towards their own happiness, but towards pleasing and gratifying the Deity who would reward good conduct by everlasting felicity, and punish bad conduct by eternal misery. A man was not exhorted to lead a righteous life because it was to his earthly interest to do so, but because �IO DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. righteousness was pleasing in the eyes of the Deity.The same crude ideas of morality and conduct still' obtain among certain unprogressive religious sects.That portion of the Christian community which believesin moral and religious progress on the lines of Rational­ ism has long since abandoned such, as being at once' childish and incongruous with the established facts of science and history. That Christianity exercises an enormous influence in the interests of morality cannot be denied. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women living in our midst to-day the outward morality of whose lives isentirely due to the fact of their minds being under the influence of Christian dogma. The bribe of an eternal Paradise on the one hand, and the threat of everlasting damnation on the other, restrain these men and women from following their own evil inclinations and adopting the vices of society. And there can be no doubt that,in the absence of such restraint, the criminality in this and other civilised lands would be considerably greater than it is at present. But, while admitting all this, it remains to be said that the position taken up on the general question of morality and religion by certain­ writers of eminence, who protest that the cancelling of theological dogmas, and the substitution of a Rationalist philosophy in the place of a supernatural faith, are certain to undermine and overthrow morality, is one w’hich is both absurd and untenable. Morality does not depend on the acceptance of theological dogmas, or on a belief in a particular phase of religious faith, but on the very laws and conditions of life; and while the observance of these laws and conditions continues it matters little, if anything, what the religious or theo­ logical bias of mankind may be. The laws which govern the moral life are as eternal and immutable as those which govern physical being; and in just the same way as a breach of physical law results in pain or in death, so also a breach of moral law results in unhappiness and evil. Darwinism has placed the whole question of human conduct upon a firm and comprehensive basis. It has revealed man in his real character as a social animal, �DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 11 explained how his progenitors became social, and has shed a flood of light upon the origin and development of man’s moral sense or conscience. * Moral science has enabled us to determine with exactness and preci­ sion how and why certain conduct is good and certain other conduct bad. (Good conduct consists in a course of action which results in the well-being and happiness of the individual and of the race; bad conduct consists in a course of action which results in evil and pain.) It has defined morality as being a condition which makes social life possible, and it has enabled us to deduce from the laws of social life and the conditions of social existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness.f Happiness, considered as the ultimate aim of human life, has been made more possible of realisation by the new conception of morality which Darwinism has introduced. And while the theo­ logical dogma of man’s inherent depravity, and his inability to do good without the help of a Deity who cursed the human race, has been finally disposed of, science has clearly demonstrated man’s capacity for virtue and for moral progress, and has made it possible to accept as a logical certainty that not only the moral but also the physical and mental perfectibility of man will eventually be attained. There are, of course, those, preferring to dwell in the realms of illusion and unreality rather than give credence to the teachings of science, to whom the immeasurable effect which Darwinism has had upon religious thought will ever appear as a matter for deep lamentation. But to thinking men and women, to those who are prepared to fearlessly embrace the truth and to conform to the realities of human life, it must always be a subject for great rejoicing. The theological libel, of man’s hope­ less degeneracy, has been exposed and exploded; and the clarion voice of Science has proclaimed that man has risen—risen from barbarism to civilisation, from * “Descent of Man,” pp. 97-127. + Vide Herbert Spencer’s letter to J. S. Mill in Bain’s “ Mental and Moral Science,” pp. 721, 722. �12 DARWINISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, ignorance to enlightenment, from depravity to culture. And while the past history of man has been revealed to us, and the present life has been rid of the doubts and the fears which for ages had overshadowed it, we have been afforded a glimpse of the hopeful future that lies before our race. Just as we believe that the present generation excels in moral dignity and intel­ lectual grandeur the generations that preceded it, so must we believe that, assuming the human race con­ tinues and the conditions of life remain the same, future generations shall excel all that precede them. As Emerson has said, we are but at the cockcrowing of civilisation. The day of Humanity has hardly dawned. In the great light of its glorious noontide, when the brute inheritance will be finally thrown off, and when manhood and womanhood shall be developed in all their fullness and in all their beauty, then will the religion of human love and human duty, to which the intellectual movement of the present century has given birth, find a living utterance in every heart and in everv mind. �OUR PROPAGANDIST PRESS COMMITTEE. THIsFCgnmittee is formed for the purpose of assisting in the productiowrndRgnculation of liberal publications. Tht^^jgjsrs of the Committee are Mr. G. J. Holyoake, Dr. Bithell, Mr. F. J. Gould, Mr. Frederick Millar, and Mr. Charles A.J^atts. It is thought that the most efficient means of spreading the prin­ ciples of Rationalism is that of books and pamphlets. Many will read a pamphlet who would never dream of visiting a lecture hall. At the quiet fireside arguments strike home which might be dissi­ pated by the excitement of a public debate. The lecturer wins his thousands, the penman his tens of thousands. The aim of the various writers is to obtain converts by per­ suasiveness rather than undue hostility towards the popular creeds. The author of each pamphlet is alone responsible for the state­ ments contained therein. All who are in sympathy with the movement are earnestly re­ quested to contribute towards the expenses as liberally as their means will allow. The names of donors will not be published without their consent. Contributions should be forwarded to Mr. Charles A. Watts, 17, Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C. Cheques should be crossed “ Central Bank of London, Blackfriars Branch.” g PUBLICATIONS ISSUED FOR THE COMMITTEE BY MESSRS. WATTS & CO. Agnostic Problems, dBamg S Examination of Some Questions of the Deepest Interest, as Viewed from the Agnostic Standpoint. By R. Bithell, B.Sc. Ph.D. Cheap Popular Edition, cloth, 2s. 6d. post free. a. I’ id. each, by post ij^d., Agnosticism and Immortality. By S. Laing, author of “ Modern Science and Modern Thought,” etc. Humanity and Dogma. By Amos Waters. What the Old Testament Says About Itself. By Julian. The Old Testament Unhistoric and Unscientific. By Julian. The Four Gospels. By Julian. The Subject of the Four Gospels. By Julian. LIBERTY OF BEQUESTS COMMITTEE. This Committee is formed for procuring the passing of a law legalising bequests for Secular and Free Thought purposes. Subscriptions in furtherance of the object of this Committee may be sent to Mr. George Anderson, Hon. Treasurer, 35a, Great George Street, London, S.W. �Demy 8vo, handsomely bound in cloth, price 2s. 6d. post fi^e,. CHEAP POPULAR EDITION. OF ' . r‘c,- -•‘1 AGNOSTIC PROBLEMS. BEING AN EXAMINATION £JF SOME QUESTIONS OF THE DEEPEST INTEREST, AS VIEWED FROM THE AGNOSTIC STANDPOINT. By RICHARD BITHELL, B.Sc., Ph.D. The volume is fascinatingly interesting, remarkably complete, and so thoroughly explains the Agnostic position that the merest tyro in metaphysics may grasp its contents....... “Agnostic Problems” has filled a gap that had remained too long open ; and, without any desire to flatter Dr. Bithell, it may be truthfully said that it has filled it with such solid material that it will re­ quire more than all the united strength of the opponents of Agnosticism to shatter one single stone of the substantial edifice thus put together. The work is one that ought to be read by every thinking man, be he Christian, Jew, Agnostic, or Atheist.—Secular Review. Handsomely bound in cloth, price is. 6d., by post is. 8d., Stepping-Stones to? Agnosticism. By F. J. GgYjLD. With Introduction by G. J. Holyoake. Contents.—I. Ecce Deus ; or, A New God. II. Miracles Weighed in the Balances. III. Our Brother Christ. IV. The Immortal Bible. V, The Noble Path. VI. Agnosticism Writ Plain. Bound in cloth, price 2s., by post 2s. 3d., AGNOSTIC FIRST PRINCIPLES. Being a Critical Exposition of the Spencerian System of Thought. By ALBERT SIMMONS (Ignotus). With Preface by Richard Bithell, B.Sc., Ph.D. This is a very able summary of Spencer’s philosophy, written for those who have not the opportunity to read or the ability to follow all that great thinker’s works. Mr. Simmons is an enthu­ siast, and he has evidently undertaken a labour of love..............A careful and solid performance.—Progress. London : Watts & Co., 17, Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, E.C. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. 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Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1891] Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N487 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Religion Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Darwinism and religious thought), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Darwinism Evolution-Religious Aspects-Christianity NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/3c176c2710e0a55c900a047b955d6160.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=JAiXZJ9PDrfvy3MQg1S%7EVLGhqUPy6Ajcp-rj1eUxY%7EoNwHrNdrW9o%7E82PsLTtoQd5PhIdGAYFmPTqOZsSg2FFUpOn6n3OzkDgVRtM14ngDFMARczctGooGgHG2qmDiMBRq2SxLF-4hFC89VSzrjNrIzODfWY5o2ctt1HjCDBGmIZT6eE-%7ExC6od-ImPAEmUXXJhE4jnnFu359h2ly5dcm0s%7EAysepqmfgU06lUrNoERHXNSHyUud2VaWYNUCfYCfQ0duuNbH1PzSCuLyKuacooxL5tJc4Jf-cUUJdDYptKAH0AMn-djtm--qUZxpVuT%7EFg8sflj0ZzpvLGAcw3cEmA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM b72444926b7b9c41566b34bb7092eb99 PDF Text Text ! KJlSlT- NATIONALSECULARSOCIETY * / THE PEOPLE’S DARWIN OR DARWIN MADE EASY A f By E. B. AVELING, D.Sc. R. FORDER, 28, Stonecutter Street, London, E.C. i ■l ��PUBLISHER’S NOTE. This popular exposition of Darwinism has been for some time out of print, but although the book has had a large sale, the enquiries for it have been as numerous as ever, and I have, therefore, issued the present edition. To those unacquainted with the writings of Darwin, this work will be of great assistance, giving as it does in a concise form an epitome of his views and teachings. R. FORDER. ��, I THE DARWINIAN THEORY. Bj/ EDWARD B. AVI!LING, D.So. Chapter I.—ITS MEANING. We must not confuse the Darwinian theory with Evolution. It is a part of that larger whole. Evolution is the name for the idea of the unity and continuity of phsenomena. The evolutionist regards all the phenomena of the universe as natural, and does not believe in the intervention of the supernatural. To him there never is, never has been, and never will be, any break in the series of events. The evolutionist pure and simple does not recognise any hiatus between man and other animals, between the animal and the plant, between the living and the non-living. In this wide sense I cannot, strange as this may seem, call Charles Darwin an evolutionist. For in the “ Origin of Species ” he uses one phrase, not so fat as I know contra­ dicted or modified in more recently published utterances, that may fairly be quoted as evidence of his belief in the supernatural origin of life. It is the well-known sentence : “ There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” Darwin’s great work was done in relation to living things. His two remarkable theories of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection have bearing only on plants and animals. Darwin’s hypotheses had to do with the evolution of thes< two highest forms of matter known to us. They havt nothing to do with the question of the origin of life, or the first formation of organic bodies. In dealing with his ideas, we must start, as he started, with life as existing on the earth. �2 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. Organic matter is given. The question is how, organic or living matter once in being, the many diverse forms of plants and animals have arisen. The understanding of Darwin’s theories turns on the understanding of the word “ species.” What is a species of plant or animal ? What is meant when we label a certain number of animals, Canis familiaris (dog) e.g., and another set, c. lupus (wolf) ? The old idea, still prevalent among the uneducated, was that the word “ species ” should be applied to all the animals, or to all the plants, that had taken origin from one original pair of parents, or from one parent in which the two sexes were united in the same individual. /The question as to the origin of this original pair of progenitors, or original bi-sexual progenitor, was answered by the statement that these had been Rpflp.ia.lly created out of nothing by god. Clearly this conception of species was wholly based on the teachings of the Mosaic cosmogony. As long as men were foolish enough to take as their' guide, not only in matters of daily conduct but on scientific questions, the Hebrew bible, such a conception of a species was the only possible conception. To the naturalist of to-day the word “ species ” is a con­ venient label to be placed on a certain set of living beings that have certain points of resemblance, one with another. It is entirely arbitrary; as arbitrary as the name you give your child. Indeed, all our classification terms are thus arbitrary, artificial. They are very convenient, but they do not express the fact that any corresponding divisions exist in nature. We look abroad on the world and see that, roughly speaking, all things in it are either living or non­ living, but we find it impossible to give a satisfactory defini­ tion of the living as distinct from the non-living, when we study the lowest forms of organic bodies. Yet for con­ venience’ sake we make an artificial aa>a useful division between the two great realms of objectf In the same way we speak of the two a. mal and vege­ table kingdoms. It is impossible to distinguish the lower animals from the lower plants, but we speak of the two kingdoms^ and find it a great convenience thus to speak. In like manner we divide the kingdom e. g. of animals into artificial groups that we call sul-kingdoms. Of these one �TH® DARWINIAN THEORY. 3 is the Vertebrata or backboned animals. The sub-kingdom is broken up into classes. The Vertebrata are said to consist of the fishes, amphibia, reptilia, birds, mammals. A class such as the Mammalia is made up of orders. Thus among the thirteen orders of the class Mammalia are the Carnivora •(flesh-eaters). In the same arbitrary way our coders are divided into genera—Canis (dog) is a genus of the order Carnivora—and each genus into species—familiaris (com­ mon) is a species of the genus Canis. We carry our artificial classification further, and often divide a species into varieties. The species Canis familiaris contains many varieties, as the mastiff, the greyhound, the bull-dog. These varieties, whether of a plant or animal species, are admitted by everyone to be due to quite natural causes. They have originated without any intervention of the supernatural. The evolutionist holds that all the other divisions have had an equally natural origin, and that species have evolved under natural laws in the past, as varieties are known to evolve under natural laws in the present; that all the complex forms of living things that have lived on the earth have been produced by perfectly natural processes one from another, and all from the simplest original forms of living matter. But the special creationist holds that species have been called into existence at the will of an almighty being. Let us now see what light Charles Darwin has thrown on this question, luong before his time other thinkers had grown dissatisfied with the no-explanation “ god did it.” In England, in Germany, and in France men had begun to think that the idea of an almighty god calling into being species separately was not tenable, and that it was more probable that a slow process of development had gone on by which the forms of living things had grown more and more numerous and different one from another. In England the grandfather of Charles, Erasmus Darwin, had written as early as 1794 the following pas­ sage in his “ Zoonomia” :—“When we revolve in. our minds, first, the great changes which we see naturally produced in animals after their nativity . . . when we think over the great changes introduced into various ani­ mals by artificial or accidental cultivation . . . when we enumerate the great changes produced in the species of �4 TH'-: theory. animals before their nativity . . . when we revolve in our minds the great similarity of structure which obtains in all the warm-blooded animals . . . one is led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living fila­ ment. . . . From their first rudiment or primordium to the termination of their lives, all animals undergo per­ petual transformations . , . and many of these organised forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. . . . The three great objects of desire are thoBe of lust, hunger, and security. A great want of one part of the animal world has consisted in the desire of the exclusive possession of the females; and these have acquired weapons to combat each other for this purpose. . . . The final cause of this contest among the males seems to be that the strongest and most active animals should propa­ gate the species, which should thence become improved. . . . From thus meditating on the great similarity of the warm-blooded animals and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity ; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of these changes of animals above described have been pro­ duced ; would it be too bold to imagine that in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps mil­ lions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine that all warm­ blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which The Great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of con­ tinuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end ?” To which one is inclined to add, Amen! Here are undoubtedly the germs of the ideas of Evolution, of natural selection, though thty are confused by the introduction of “ The Great First Cause,” and are only applied to birds and mammals, not to living things generally. In Germany Goethe had a shadowing forth of the great truth :—“ The inward perfection and purpose of the animal body are built up stage by stage, and the changes depend on its connexion with the external world. No �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 5 part of an animal considered carefully is useless or, as men have phrased it, produced arbitrarily. One will not in the future as to organs ask for what do they serve, but whence do they spring ? One will not assert that a bull has horns in order to push, but one will inquire how he could have horns at all in order to push. This plan of nature works eternally ; there is no rest or stay. But not all that she bi ings forth can she preserve and maintain; she cannot retain all which she produces. We have still a most un­ finished variety of organic forms remaining, which cannot yet be connected in one great genealogical tree.” In France, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire (the elder of the two St. Hilaires) and Lamarck had ideas as to the production of species' from pre-existing species even more clear than those of either the Englishman or German. Thus, in the Life of Etienne, written by his son, we have the following:— “ And in this Memoir written in 1795, published at the beginning of 1796, is found the germ of the philosophic anatomy, not merely foreshadowed, not merely indicated, but formulated with marvellous clearness. Nature, these are the author's own words, has formed all living things on a uniform plan, essentially the same in principle, but varying in a thousand ways in all details. And in the same class of animals the diverse- forms in which nature has . been pleased to make each species exist, are all divided one from another. It suffices her to change certain propor­ tions in the organs to fit them for new functions, to ex 'nd or restrict their use.” In “ Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique” he gives at the end of the first vol. on p. 424 (1809), under the heading chapter iii., the following remarkable summary of his views :—“ That it is not true that species are as old as nature, aud that they have all existed for"the same length of time the one as the other, but that it is true that they are formed successively, that they have only a relative per­ sistence and remain constant for no great length of time.” Again, in his “ Histoire Naturelie des Animaux,” Intro­ duction, p. 161 (1815), Lamarck writes :—“ That the con­ ditions in which the different races of animals found themselves placed as they spread oy degrees over different points of the globe and in the waters have given to each �(J THE DARWINIAN THEORY. special habits, and that these habits, which they were obliged to contract according to their habitats and manner of living, may have, for each one of these races, modified the organisation of the individuals, the form and condition of their organs, and placed these in relation with the habitual actions of these individuals; it is now no longer possible to doubt.” And again : “ However small the modifications may be that have taken place under our eyes, and of which we have convinced ourselves by the observation of those animals whose habits we have arbitrarily changed, these same modifications suffice to show us the extent of those which, with time, animals may have experienced in their form, their organs, even their organisation, from the conditions under which they have lived, and which have .modified all the races to an almost infinite extent.” The idea that these great men had put thus vaguely, Charles Darwin reduced to distinct form. They all held that species must have evolved under the influence of external circumstances. He showed that they had evolved, and demonstrated at least one of the principles on which evolution took place. His great, work on the “ Origin of Species ” was pub­ lished in 1869. To those who are wont to speak of the premature nature of his conclusions the following facts are commended. From 1832 to 1837 he had been travelling round the world in the “ Beagle ” collecting facts. On his return he continued collecting facts for five years more Then, from 1842 to 1844, he made notes. In the latter year he drew out a sketch of his work, and fifteen years later published his conclusions. We must remember that the “ Origin of Species ” is, to a large extent, an abstract and a statement of results. Some of the enormous number of facts on which the con­ clusions given in the “ Origin of Species ” are based will be found in the two volumes of the Animals and Plants under Domesticuiion,” published after the “ Origin of Species.” The first part of the “ Origin of Species ” is occupied with the discussion of these four points, each of which must be discussed briefly here. Variation under domesti­ cation. Artificial selection. Variation under nature. Natural selection. �THE DABWINIAN THEORY. 7 (1) Variation wader Domestication.—The animals and plants that have been brought under the dominion of man vary, «.e., no two individuals of the same species are com­ pletely alike. The rose-trees produced from a given rosetree are dissimilar. The puppies of the same litter are not all alike. Every breeder, every horticulturist knows that the living things he has under his care vary. (2) Artificial Selection.—Man, by noticing the “ acci­ dental” variations that occur, has been able, by careful selection and careful breeding, to aid in the production of many variations. The word “ accidental ” is used, as at present we cannot tell why one seedling of a pansy should, have an arrangement of color different from its com­ panions—why one member of a family should be swifter than its fellows. Granted the initial variation, artificial selection may come into play. Man selecting and breeding from the individuals selected, a form of plant or animal very different in details from the parent whence it sprang, and from the unvarying descendants of that parent, may be obtained. In the Animals and Plants under Domestication Darwin gives innumerable cases of the results of this selection by man. In the little space at my disposal I can only "men­ tion one or two. From the plant-kingdom take the follow­ ing. In the year 1596 the hyacinth was first introduced into this country. In 1597, from the one variety brought in four varieties were, according to Gerarde, known. In 1629 Parkinson speaks of eight. In 1864 Paul mentions 700. In Scotland a white rose-tree in the year 1793 produced a red seedling. From this the gardener bred carefully and closely. In 20 years 26 varieties were known, and in 50 years 300, all derived from one “ accidental ” variation. Amongst the animals, the example most frequently quoted, and perhaps the most remarkable, is the case of the pigeon. Every one knows the many different kinds of pigeon,the runts, barbs,pouters,tumblers, jacobins, carriers, fantails. All these are known to have originated from one original form, the blue rock pigeon (Columba livia), during the time that man has taken an interest in the breeding of these birds. The thoughtless folk cry out, “ Yes, but these are all of the same species. They are all hyacinths, or roses, or �8 THE DABWINTAN THEOBY. • pigeons. They never become any other ‘ species.’ ” The very obvious answer is, that they are all of the, same species still to us, because we know the history of the case. We name them still as all of the same species, because we know they are all derived by natural variation and arti­ ficial selection from one parent form. But if e. g. the varieties of pigeon were placed before an unprejudiced ob­ server, who did not know their history, and he were asked whether they all belonged to the same species, he would, I doubt not, reply “ No, nor even to the same genus.” (3) Va/riation under Nature.—Little proof of this is re­ quired. Everyone has set out on the hopeless search for the two blades of grass exactly alike. In the wild woods or in the trim garden, in the waters of the ocean as in the aquaria, endless variation is evident. There is perhaps less need to insist on this variation than on that occurring under domestication. But the great question arises, “ What results from this variation of living things in a state of nature ?” We have seen how the variations of do­ mestic animals or plants may be seized on and utilised to­ wards the production of new varieties. Is anything of the same nature taking place among the living beings not directly under the sway of man ? (4) Natural Selection.—Here is the great suggestion of Charles Darwin ; the key to so many problems in biology. He shows (a) that there is a struggle for life among living things; (ft) that any variation of structure or function giving to its possessor an advantage in the struggle is likely to be preserved ; (c) that the possessor of such a variation is more likely to survive than its fellow not thus gifted ; (d) that the possessor of such an advantageous variation is more likely than another destitute of it to have offspring; (e) that in the offspring the variation will be repeated and intensified; (/) that, transmitted from generation to generation and becoming more and more marked, the modification becomes at last permanent, and a new variety, or a new species results. The struggle for life. The world is one great battle­ field. Beneath its surface, within the depths of its waters, in the very air is eternal strife. All living beings are cease­ lessly fighting. The life of our great cities, with its con­ test of class with class, of individual with individual, is the �THE DABWINIAN THEORY. type of all life. In the darkness of the soil of the earth the roots of the plants are struggling with each other for food. In the microscopic drop of water the Infusoria sweep ceaselessly round and round, searching for the food that is not sufficient for them all. Every living thing is an Ishmael. Its hand is against all others. The hands of all others are against it. And as among men, so also among the more lowly organised creatures, the bitterest struggle is ever between those who are akin one to another. Vcb victis, woe to the conquered, is the cry of the world. If plant or animal does not succeed, it perishes. How does nature, in her silent, imperturbable fashion, take advantage of these eternal variations in the flowers and in the ani­ mals ? By Natural Selection, or the survival of the fittest. Who are to be the survivors in this battle ? Who are doomed to be numbered among the slain ? Those best fitted for the struggle will survive. Those not adapted to the circumstances of the unending fight are doomed. The fittest will hold out the longest. That which possesses in strength or in any other way an advari 'age over its fel­ lows will conquer them in the struggle for existence. If any variation in an individual plant or animal is of such a nature that its possessor will be better fitted for life-work, that possessor will have an advantage over its fellows— will stand a better chance than they of surviving, will transmit its variation to its offspring, possibly in intensi­ fied form. The offspring, even better fitted than their parents for life, triumph yet more completely over their fellows. Thus is the original slight variation strengthened until, after a long time, forms result so differing from the first individual that presented the variation, that the biolo­ gist is constrained to regard them as belonging to a species other than that comprising the original plant or animal. • This is the great principle of Natural Selection, or the survival of the fittest. The variations that are of benefit to the beings possessing them are naturally selected. The enunciation of this principle and the elucidation of it have been in especial the work of Charles Darwin. At the base of everything there is this variation of the individual. That the variations are infinite in number and in kind no one can doubt. But as to the causes of variation and as to the'laws which govern it, we are much �10 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. in the dark. On both these points Charles Darwin speaks with his usual caution ; and although since the publication of the “Origin of Species” many suggestions have been made and some light thrown on the subject, we are not yet in a position to do more than still suggest. Variation, i.e. the possession of some quality of structure or of function by one or more individuals of a group whose other members do not possess the quality, is of two kinds: that which appears in the individual during the course of its life, and is due to the conditions of life ; and that which appears in the offspring in consequence of the coming together of two parent forms. Thus a plant may as it grows up to the adult condition—as it passes through the stages of budding, flowering, fruiting, show certain modifications of form, of color, of function that are probably due to the circumstances in which it is placed. Or it may show modifications that are due to the fact that the seed whence it sprang was ripened by pollen from a plant other than that which produced the seed. The conditions of life have much to do with variation. No two individuals of the same species are exposed to identical conditions. Two amoebae in the stagnant water receive different quantities of heat and of light and of food. To all the forces from without that impinge on the living body, that body, as long as it is alive, responds. And such response is often in the nature of a change slight enough at first, but with great potentiality, if it is repeated and intensified. We may regard many of the variations in structure and function that distinguish individuals one from another, as due to the effect of the conditions of life on different individuals. This response on the part of the living organism to the forces that environ and play on it, is called Adaptation. But without doubt, a second great cause of the initial variation without which the principle of natural selection would have nothing on which to work, is cross fertilisation. The seeds of plants, the ova or eggs of animals, are almost always the result of the crossing of two individuals. That this is the case in all the higher animals in which the two sexes are in distinct individuals is evident. But even in the* lower animals, in which the two sexes are present in the same individual, such as the leech or the snail, there �THE DABWINIAN THEOBY. 11 are in almost every case arrangements that compel or at least permit of cross fertilisation. Thus if A and B ar two bisexual individuals of the same species, the ova of __ are fertilised by B, and those of B by A. With plants the rule is that both pollen (the fertilising agent) and ovules (the seeds that are to be) are found in the same individual. For a long time botanists thought that the ovule of a given violet e.g. was fertilised by the pollen from the same violet. But the researches of Darwin in England, of Gaertner and Kolreuter in Germany have shown that this is very rarely the case. Generally the ovule of a given flower is fertilised by the pollen of another flower of the same kind. Tn this cross fertilisation we have the possibility of endless variation, for the offspring is the product of two differently circumstanced parents. Like as the two parents may be, they have lived in slightly different places, have received different supplies of food, have come into contact with different external agencies.' Hence every new being is the result of the collision of two cells, male and female, from two parents that have been subject to different conditions of life. Nor must we expect in such a case that the offspring will present those qualities only that are to be found in the parents. There is what I have called a collision of two cells. The properties of the one parent will act on those of the other, and new modifications may result. When we place together our copper with its properties as a metal, and our nitric acid with its proper­ ties as an acid, we find new bodies formed, with properties other than those of the two substances used. In like manner, when two living beings conjoin to form offspring, that offspring is likely to present not only the characters ©f its parents, but new and often unexpected characters, due to the blending and modification within it of the ancestral characters. The name given to the principle by which the descendants of certain parent forms present characters that are due to those of the parents is called Heredity, whether those characters are like or unlike those of the parents. The Darwinian theory, therefore, is that all the species of animals and plants in existence to-day have been evolved from pre-existing living forms ; that this evolution �12 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. is explained by natural selection; that variations occurring in living beings under certain conditions, may be of advantage to the possessor; that the possessor of these has a better chance than others in the battle for life; that he survives when others may perish ; that he has a better chance of pro­ ducing offspring; that to the offspring the special useful characteristic is transmitted ; that in them it becomes intensified and ultimately fixed as a permanent mark of the group. Two of the causes of variation in individuals appear to be the varying nature’of the conditions of life, and cross fertilisation. - / Chapter II.—ITS DIFFICULTIES. The antagonists of Darwinism are constantly, with much emphasis and repetition, reminding us of the difficulties of the theory. They are not, as a rule, sufficiently generous to confess that their instructor as to those difficulties was Darwin himself. Every weapon against his idea has been placed in the hands of its opponents by Darwin. Since the publication of the “ Origin of Species ” in 1859, not a single scientific objection of any moment has been brought forward that was not anticipated in that work. The chief difficulties are the following. The absence of intermediate forms ; the perfection of certain organs ; the persistence of certain forms of living things ; instinct, man, and mind. (1) The Absence of Intermediate Forms.—This difficulty is embodied in the frequent question addressed to the evolutionist by unbelievers in science. “ Where are the connecting links ? ” It was urged in the years immediately foliowing the publication of the “ Origin of Species,” and urged then with some justice, that the intermediate forms between the different species, genera, orders, classes of plants and animals were wanting. But now, after twentyfour years of further work in biological science, this objection no longer holds. For the researches of the botanist, the zoologist, and the palaeontologist, guided to a large exteht by the great principle associated with Darwin’^ �THE. DARWINIAN THEORY. 13 name, have shown ns that these “ connecting links " exist, or have existed. To-day we can state positively that hardly a species of plant or animal exists that does not glide, as it were, into the species most closely allied to it. Scarcely any species of living thing can now be marked off by a hard-and-fast line from all other species. The gradations between the groups that we make in our artificial way are insensible. And that which is true of species is also true of larger divisions in our system of classification. Generally, orders, classes, sub-kingdoms, are found to pass imperceptibly into their neighbors, and certain forms of living things are found hovering on the border line of two groups, and placed by some observers in one, by some in another division. The general reader will understand this better if I take one or two examples from the animal kingdom. The examples shall be taken from the cases of forms inter­ mediate to classes, as they will be comprehended better than illustrations of connecting links between species. These last need for their understanding a special know­ ledge of botany or zoology. The sub-kingdom of Vertebrata, or back-boned animals, is still divided generally into five special classes—the Mammalia, or animals that suckle their young; Aves, or birds ; Reptilia, or reptiles ; Amphibia, or the frog-class; Pisces, or fishes. When science, as well as the general ideas of men, was vitiated in its thinking by the inaccurate dogma of special creation, it was thought that these five classes were clearly marked off one from another. But now-a-days intermediate forms are known between the different classes. Mammalia and Aves e.g. are connected by the Ornithorhyncus, opvis (ornis) = bird, pwxos (rhunchos), = snout; that is the duck­ billed platypus of Australia, an animal with a fur covering, with the bill of a bird, with webbed feet, and with points of internal structure that are partly mammalian, partly avian. The Aves and Reptilia are connected by the extinct Pterodactyl, irrepov (pteron) =. wing, SaKrvXos (daktulos), = finger. This animal has a wing developed on one finger of the anterior limb, and yet is to a large extent reptilian'in its structure. The Reptilia and Am­ phibia pass so readily into each other that until within the last few years the members of the two groups were �14 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. placed together under the head of Reptilia. The frog e.g. is in its early life a fish, in its adult condition a reptile. In it >nd its allies we have links not only between Reptilia and Amphibia, but between both these and the lower vertebrate class, the Pisces. Another connecting link between the Reptilia and the Pisces is the Lepidosiren, or mudfish of the Gambia, an animal as to which there was for a long time dispute. Some naturalists placed it in the higher, others in the lower class. No* are these linking-on forms only to be found con­ necting classes. The larger divisions or sub-kingdoms which are divided into classes also pass by insensible gradations into one another. Thus the Vertebrata are con­ nected with the Mollusca or soft-bodied animals by the Amphioxus, or lancelet of the -Mediterranean. This little animal, usually classed with the fishes, is about one inch in length, has no bones or cartilages whatever, no teeth, no true heart, no gills, no brain, no sense organs.* The sole representative of its backbone is a rod of tissue lying along the middle line of the back. The backbone of every vertebrate, even of man himself, begins as just such a rod in the middle line of back, marking out the position of the vertebral column that will appear later, first as cartilage, then as bone. Hence we are entitled to regard Amphioxus as the lowest vertebrate, though if the history of the development of the vertebral column in the higher mem­ bers of the sub-kingdom were not known, we should have no suspicion of its true relations. But Amphioxus, in many details of its structure, is closely related to a group of the Mollusca called the Ascidioida. ao-xos (ascos), = bag, «8os (eidos), = like­ ness. Certain members of this group have a line of tissue identical with the structure met with in Amphioxus, and are a transitory condition in the rest of the Vertebrata. Further, in the structure of their breathing apparatus, and in many other points of their anatomy, they are closely allied to the lowest of the Vertebrata. In the same way it could be shown that other groups in the animal, and groups in the vegetable kingdom, are connected by intermediate forms, and generally it may be said that the distinctions between the divisions of living things are fading away in the light of advancing knowledge, �THE DABWINIAN THEORY. 15 or in common phrase, the majority of connecting links are known. That all are not known is to be ascribed to two causes, (a) In the battle for life intermediate forms are often crushed out. This might be expected from the general principles of natural selection. Suppose some one member of a group A varies in some particular direction, and by the transmission, intensification, and fixing of the variation, a new form B arises. The members of the group A that have not varied are still fitted for their life conditions. The members of the group B are fitted for certain slightly or largely different conditions. But the intermediate forms are likely to be crushed out of existence between the living things of group A and group B. That this is the case is shown by the fact that the connecting links are dying ofE. Ornithorhyncus is becoming extinct in Australia, as Amphioxus is vanishing from the Mediterranean Sea. A century hence these witnesses to the truth of the Darwinian hypothesis will probably be extinct. But a century hence this will not matter greatly, as everyone will then be an evolutionist. (6) The objection may be raised, that even if this sup­ pression of intermediate forms occurs, the remains of these forms ought to be found in the records of the rocks. But the reply to this is “ the imperfection of the geological record.” For a fossil to be of value to the student in con­ nexion with this study of intermediate forms four things are necessary. The. plant or animal must be preservable. Thus a fossil jelly-fish is inconceivable. The conditions in which it is at the time of its death must be favorable to its preservation. Millions of living things have died under such circumstances that their remains could not be pre­ served. The sedimentary rocks in which the remains are preserved, supposing the first two requisites are attained, must not be subjected to any agency such as fire that will destroy the organic remains. These rocks, with their remains, must be observed by man. When we consider how many living forms are incapable of preservation, and especially those that are of most interest in this connexion ; how often the conditions necessary for their preservation have been wanting; how frequently other changes have destroyed or altered the rocks containing fossils that have �16 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. been preserved ; how limited is the area of the earth’s surface yet investigated ; and how, in especial, the tropical regions of the earth where evolution has probably been most active, have received but little study, there should not be much wonder that the record of the fossils is very imperfect. But it should be remembered that every new discovery among the frocks has been in harmony with Evolution, and opposed to the idea of special creation. (2) The perfection of certain organs.—The unbelievers often point to such organs as the human eye, and ask : “ How is it possible to conceive that this wonderful structure has been slowly evolved in the course of a long period of time from simpler conditions, that lead us back ultimately to mere specks of color ?” The answers are three. First, that this is much more possible than the creation of such an organ. Second, that we have every possible gradation in the animal between the eye of man and the lowest and simplest eye known. Third, we see in the development of every individual human being every complex organ pass through stages of development from the most simple form to the most complex, and these Btages are identical with the permanent conditions in certain of the lower animals. The eye of man, e.g., is but a modification of part of the integument, and in its stages of development passes rapidly through condition after con­ dition that are identical with the eye-structures to be seen in more simply organised members of the animal kingdom. (3) The persistence of certain forms of living things.—This difficulty takes two forms. The follower of Darwin is as-ked how he explains the fact that whilst variation and natural selection are at work everywhere, yet certain low> simple forms persist, so that even to-day the single-celled organisms that represent some of the very earliest stages in the evolution of the animal or plant kingdom are yet in existence. In answer to this the reply is given that variation is not universal. To take an example. Suppose100 members of the group A; 1 only varies ; 99 remain as their ancestors were. The descendants of the one, if the variation is transmitted, intensified, and fixtxi, give rise in turn to a new form, B, so distinct from A as to be 'sailed a new species. But the descendants of the 99 unvarying ones are still as their ancestors, and aie still �THE DABWINIAI< .HEORY, 17 members of the species A. Of a hundred men, e.g., one may vary in the direction of some new higher order of thought, whilst the ninety and nine continue in the same old errors and superstitions. Again it is known that in certain parts of the world, as e.g. Egypt, the living forms are to-day not different from those that by pictorial and other representations we know to have existed there hundreds of years ago. But in the first’ place the few hundred, or even thousand years of history are only a heart-beat in the vast ages that this earth has been in existence. A thousand years in thy sight, oh Evolution, are but as a watch in the night! And further in the cases usually quoted, as Egypt, e.g. the conditions of life during the historical period have been uniform, and therefore variation to any great extent would not be expected. In this connexion it may be well to deal with one special case that the average Christian Evidence man is always bringing forward—that of the Trilobite. Of course he knows nothing,, as a rule, of the structure of the Trilobite and its relations to other animals. But he has read that it occurs very low down in the sedimentary rocks, that it is of fairly complex organisation, and that other animals lower than it in the scale of structure are not pre­ served as fossils in the rocks below. The answers are that the rocks below the Silurian, in which the Trilobite first appears, are rocks that have been changed by the action of heat to such an extent that all organic remains have disappeared from them ; that we are wholly unable to tell what ages have thus had their records destroyed—ages during which living things probably existed before the time of which the Silurian strata are the memorial; and that the predecessors of the Trilobite in the gradual evolution of the animal kingdom were for the most part of such a nature that their remains did not allow of preservation. (4) Instinct.—The difficulty as to the evolution of instinct is not nearly so great now as in 1859. The old idea that reason was the prerogative of man, instinct the gift of god to the animals below man is exploded. The lower animals reason, and much that has been ascribed to instinct is the result of education. That certain animals learn very rapidly to perform certain acts that have hence been called �18 THE DARWINIAN THEOHY. instinctive may be explained, partly at least, by the fact of heredity. For the details on this interesting question ffie reader is referred to Dr. L. Buchner’s “ Mind in inimals ” (Mrs. Besant’s translation). Here I can only ay that the difficulty of instinct is by no means insur­ mountable, and that as instincts are generally useful to the animal possessing them, they come within the range of the operation of natural selection. And the difficulty that is supposed to meet the follower of Darwin in the case of societies such as those of the bees and the ants, vanishes, I think, if we bear in mind that the principle of natural selec­ tion tells in regard to societies as well as individuals, and that a variation such as that of differentiation of labor, as in the bee-state, that is useful to the community, would give that community an advantage over other communities and would be likely to be transmitted, intensified, and become fixed. (5) Hybridism,.—When members of two closely allied species cross one with another the offspring is either sterile, or produces offspring that is sterile. Sooner or later the descendants of such a union are infertile. This fact is often considered as strong evidence against the Darwinian theory. The stress laid on it is due to the emphasis with which Darwin himself dwelt on it. I cannot but think that he over-estimated the force of this fact. For no evolutionist believes that a new species arises by so cataclysmic a process as the crossing of two previously existing species. The process of evolution is far more gradual than this. If it were contended that only by the crossing of two widely different forms a new form originates, the result of the sterility of hybrids (the eross between two species) would be of great moment. But as nothing of the kind is the contention, I fail to see how this sterility is to be regarded as an argument of any great strength. Moreover, the believers in special creation seem to me to reason in a circle. They first tell us that the distinguishing mark of a species is that its members cannot interbreed with the members of another species. Then when we ask how are we to distinguish one species from another, we are told “ by the fact that the members of each species can only interbreed one with another.*’ It is, on the theory of Darwin, quite con �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 19 ceivable that two forms, B and C, might evolve along different lines from a common parent A, until at length they were so differentiated one from another, and even from the common parent, and were living in such different conditions of life, that the reproductive cells of A or B and C, cannot act on one or the other so as to produce fertile offspring. One or two of the chief points urged by Darwin as evidence that the facts connected with hybridism do not tell irresistibly against his theory are the following. Sterility is visible in individuals of the same species. Crosses between different pairs of animals that all belong to the same species have varying degrees of fertility. If it were a law, fixed as that of the Medes and Persians, that between members of the same species crossing, with as result a fertile progeny, were impossible, we should expect to find that the crossing of two individuals of the same species would always produce fertile offspring. But find­ ing, as we do, that there are varying stages of sterility between individuals said to be of the same species, we are led to think that the excessive condition of complete sterility is only an extreme case, and is dependent on causes as purely natural as are the different degrees of fertility or of sterility between individuals of the same species. There is every gradation, again, between the most perfect fertility Ind the most complete sterility, and it is difficult to con­ ceive of the special creation of groups of animals or plants between which crossing is impossible, without conceiving of the special creation of groups between which the results of crossing would be representative of every one of these intermediate stages. Again, so-called true species exposed to conditions of life that are different from those to which they have been subject, often become infertile. Animals that breed perfectly well in certain places and climates are found, on removal to other places and climates, to be quite incapable of pro­ ducing offspring. Here it seems clear that infertility is due to changed conditions. Nobody invokes the aid of the creator in these cases, and it appears to be a rational explanation of the infertility of hybrids, or the crosses between different species, that the conditions of life are sv altered as to bring about'sterility. �20 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. The great cause of the sterility between animals and plants sufficiently different one from another to be placed in different species, is probably difference in their sexual elements, a difference not the result of interposition from without, but of the modification these elements have under­ gone as the living beings in which they are produced have been exposed to different external conditions. In this discussion Darwin makes a fair use of analogy. He points out that certain trees can be grafted one upon another, whilst others are incapable of being thus grafted. Thus, the pear can be grafted upon the quince, and, with greater difficulty, upon the apple, a plant, by the way, more nearly allied to the pear than is the quince. But the pear cannot be grafted upon an elm. This difficulty of grafting is not referred to any special creative act. Indeed, the distinctions between plants that would be founded on the ease or difficulty of grafting would not coincide at all with the classification-divisions, and distinctions at present recognised—i.e., if we based our species on the possibility •or impossibility of grafting, the species thus mapped out would not be identical with those recognised to-day. Yet generally it may be said that plants closely allied can thus be blended, and that if they are not closely allied, grafting js impossible. As Darwin puts it: “ There is no more reason to think that species have been specially endowed with various degrees of sterility to prevent their crossing and blending in nature, than to think that trees have been specially endowed with various and somewhat analogous degrees of difficulty in being grafted together in order to prevent their inarching in our forests.” Again, to take an illustration from the highest living thing, certain races of man cannot interbreed. Thus the Egyptian women and the whites are almost universally infertile. If the believer in special creation holds that species, as originally created, were doomed to infertility one with another, he must at least believe that more than one species of man were created, and that the Adam and Eve story is open to suspicion. When we consider that the amount of sterility between individuals of the same species varies, that with changed conditions the sterility of individuals is affected, that the study of the anatomy and physiology of plants and animals �THE DABWINIAN THEORY. 21 shows that the chief cause of sterility is difference in the elements of the beings crossed, and when we take into account the phenomena of grafting, the difficulties of hybridism are certainly not overwhelming. (6) Man.—Many who are with Darwin in all that he cays as to the lower animals and as to plants, part company with him when he applies his theory to the human race. This is but another example of man’s false pride. He was wont, some years back, to classify himself in an order, „ and even at one time in a sub-class by himself. But all this is over now, and the order Primates or Quadrumana, now includes man, ape, and monkey. In the same waj the old fancy that the principle of natural selection weu. nc* to be applied to man, is passing away. Even the clergy are admitting that man’s bodily structure may have been derived from one of the lower animals. For furthei details on this point the reader is referred to my pamphlet on the “ Origin of Man,” and to my translation of Haeckel’s •“ Populare Vortrage” (“ Pedigree of Man ”). Not a single point in the anatomy or physiology of man separates him from his allies, the lower animals. It must be understood that when I speak of man I mean the human race as a whole. In this inquiry into the origin of species, and especially of the highest form of living things, ma^ himself, we must not fix our attention on any one race, ■ind least of all on the highest race. The ordinary person, when he discusses thf. origin of man, has in his mind the civilised and cultured European. It is this product of the evolution of man himself that he compares, most unsr.entifically, with the anthropoid or man-like apes. But the true comparison is between the lowest types of men and the man-like apes. If this comparison is made, if we study the various races of men from the highest to the lowest, and at the same time study the nearest allies of man, we find that there are greater differences in every point of anatomy and physiology between man and man than between man and ape—that is to say, if we study the skeleton, the digestive apparatus, the absorbent system, the circulatory system, the respiratory organs, the secreting organs, the nervous system, the sense organs, the muscles, the voice apparatus, the method of reproduction, and the ■dstory of the development of men generally and of the �22 THE DABWINIAN THEOBY. apes- -if we study the working of all these various organs we find that in every case the gap is not between man and ape, but between man and man. To take but one crucial case. It is usual to state that in his brain-weight man is immeasurably the superior of the ape. But the heaviest human brain yet investigated weighed 67 oz., the lightest 8 oz., whilst the anthropoid apes have been found to have a brain-weight of 16 oz. (7) Mind.—Even those who admit the probability of the truth of the Darwinian hypothesis in relation to man’s body,, deny in many cases the possibility of its truth in relation to man’s mind. But mind is only a function of the nervous system; and just as the nervous system of man is separated by no line of demarcation from that of the lower animals, so his mental powers are separated by no line of demarcation from those of the lower animals. In my “ Origin of Man ” it is shown that if we consider the mental powers of the highest and lowest men, there are greater differences between them than between those of the lowest man and the highest ape. Nay, more than that, the mental powers of the lowest men are inferior to those of the highest apes, just as their brain weights are lower than the average brain weight of the anthropoid apes. Chapteb III.—ITS EVIDENCE. Gbeat questions such as this of the origin of species can only be decided by an appeal to evidence. Evidence is of two kinds; direct and indirect or circumstantial. In our courts of justice both are admitted. A man sees a murder committed and gives direct evidence as to its committal. Or the accused is found guilty on purely circumstantial evidence. He has blood on him, the clothes and money of the murdered man are in his possession ; he has a reason for the killing of the victim ; has been seen near the place of death at the time of death. In dealing with the origin of species we have to be content for the most pait with indirect evidence. Of the direct kind not much can be brought forward favor oi �THE DABWlNIAN THEORY. _ 2ft the origin of species by natural selection. In favor o' their origin as special creations there is no evidence what ever. In fact, this view of the special creation of certaii distinct kinds of plants or animals by an almighty powei is entirely unsupported. There is not a single witness of repute on its side. The solitary argument that is some­ times urged by the ignorant on its behalf is the account in the first chapter of Genesis. But this is worthless as evidence in a scientific question. The Bible cannot for a moment be admitted as witness in this great controversy. It has, on questions such as this, no more authority than the Koran or Vedas. And the class of persons called clergy, who claim the right to speak as to the origin of species, have no voice in the matter. As clergymen, their opinion is as valueless as that of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. If they have studied science, then as scientific students they are entitled to a hearing.; but the fatal profession, as a profession, is not in a position te give a verdict on a question that can only be decided by skilled biologists and geologists. Of direct evidence in favor of special creation there is none. Of direct evidence in favor of the origin of species by natural selection there is something. The whole of the two large volumes on animals and plants under domestication is, it seems to me, evidence of this order, evidence that tells for Darwin. But when we turn to the indirect, whilst again there is none on the side of the old belief, that on the side of the new is consistent, illimitable, overwhelming. It is consistent, for every fact of science, every discovery of the past twenty-four years, is in harmony with the views of Darwin. It is illimitable because the number of these facts and discoveries is beyond all computation. It is over­ whelming because only minds blind or bitter are now un­ convinced. I, following in the main our master, range the evidence under six heads. General principles, classification, dis­ tribution, morphology, embryology, prophecy. . (1) General Principles.—The hypothesis is in harmony with the general principles of the eternity of matter, the eternity of motion, and the conservation of energy These three great principles, summed up, perhaps, in the last of the three, are the enunciation of the majestic law that matter �24 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. has never been created or destroyed, that motion has neve< ’ been created or destroyed, that the forms of matter, and the forms of motion are convertible one into the other, without any loss. The doctrine of special creation is in direct contradiction to this great truth. The Darwinian hypothesis is in harmony with it. We use the word “ matter ” as a convenient name for all that which can affect the senses. This is no definition. But it is a useful convention. No one has ever seen matter created or destroyed. All experiments show that matter is readily transformable from one of its conditions to another, but that with the transformation there is never any loss or gain. The candle burns in the closed glass flask until it goes out or is burnt away. At the end of the experiment the weight of the closed glass flask and its contents is exactly what it was at the beginning. A change has taken place, that is all. A piece of gun­ cotton is set on fire. Poof! It has vanished in smoke. The ignorant man thinks it is destroyed. But the chemist, weighing the gun-cotton first, and the air in which it is placed, and then after the burning weighing the gases that are formed, finds that the weights before and after the experiment are the Same. Ceaseless transformations of matter, but never any creation, never any destruction. And this we are led to believe has been always the case. Motion is change of place. Sometimes it is what we call molar motion, or that of evident masses. Moles = a mass. All that which is commonly called motion is of this kind. The movement of our own bodies, that of a falling stone, or of a cricket-ball thrown across the field, are molar motions. But there are forms of motion that affect the minute particles of bodies, forms out of the reach of our ordinary perception as cases of motion. Only of late years has it been shown that chemical action, heat, and light and electricity and magnetism, and life, are modes of motion. In these cases the motion appears to be of minnta particles, the little masses of bodies. Moles = a nasa^ “icula” is a diminutive ending. Hence molecule is a Ittle mass, and the motion of these small ultimate particles of substances is molecular motion. It has been shown as to these various forms of molecular motion that all are ’“.nsformable one’into the other without any loss or anv �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. Zitf creation. The copper and zinc placed in the battery set up chemical action. The wires carried from the copper and zinc are found to be electric. The wire becomes hot. Broken across, a spark with light and sound leaps across the interval. Wind the wire round a piece of soft iron, and this attracts a magnet. Bring the two ends of the connecting wire into contact with a muscle that has been recently removed from the body of an animal, and the muscle contracts. Finally dip the wire ends into acidulated water, and the water is decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen. Chemical action is set up. Not only our experiments, but our observations, show that there is ever going on this transformation of a definite quantity of one form of motion into a definite quantity of another. Ceaseless transforma­ tion of motion, but never any creation, never any destruc­ tion. And this we are led to believe has been always the case. Work is done when matter is set in motion. A man lifting a cannon-ball from the ground to the table does work. A stone falling from a cliff to the shore does work. Energy is the capacity to do work. The man who lifts the cannon-ball puts forth energy. This energy in motion is balled kinetic energy, (kinesis) = motion. The stone on the cliff is in a position to do work. Remove the cliff and it falls. But it is, as long as it remains on the rliff, only in a position to- do work, and is not doing work, ft possesses energy, or has the capacity to do work, but is not exercising that capacity. Its energy is that of position or potential energy. Potentia = power. There are therefore two kinds of energy; kinetic, that is energy in action; potential, that is energy in reserve. The principle of the conservation of energy states con­ cisely all the facts that I have now enumerated. It says that the various forms of energy, whether they be kinetic or potential, are transformable without any loss or any gain, without any destruction or any creation, one into the other ; that the matter which is set in motion by energy and the amount of motion (molar and molecular) in tha universe is, always has been, and ever will be, a constant quantity. This law is of general, of widest, application. It has to do with the living as well as the non-living. But the creation of a species means the creation of so �26 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. much matter and of so much motion. As long, therefore, as the principle of the conservation of energy is received as true, the special creation of a species of animal or plant is not thinkable. (2) Classification.—In the first chapter attention was called to the impossibility of clearly defining the limits of the various groups in our artificial systems of classification. Every species, genus, order, class, runs into the neighbor­ ing species, genus, order, class. On the hypothesis of special creation this fact is meaningless. If every species is the result of a direct act of the almighty, it might be expected to be with ease distinguishable from every other species. But if all species have arisen by the gradual modification of pre-existing forms, we should expect to find them overlapping and dovetailing. I do not say that this difficulty of definition of groups of living things is irreconcilable with the theory of special creation. Once admit a creator, and there is no knowing what form his vagaries may take. But the theory gives no explana­ tion of the fact, a rational explanation of which is afforded by Darwinism. In truth, our systems of classification on the hypothesis of special creation are only so many records of meaning­ less caprice on the part of a creator. But on the hypo­ thesis of the origin of species oy natural selection or descent with variation, our systems of classification are a historical record. They are veritable genealogical trees. The placing of a number of animals or plants together in one group is equivalent to stating that they have had a common ancestor from whom they have all descended within a comparatively recent period, that is, within a few thousands or millions of years. The very difficulty of defining a genus or species becomes no longer a source of trouble. It is a delight to us, as it affords us a continual reminder that all the different genera and species have arisen by modification of pre-existing forms, and graduate imper­ ceptibly one into the other. Our classification of animals and plants is at once a proof and a record of the evolution of living things. (3) Distribution of Diving Things.—The facts of the dis­ tribution of plants and animals both in space and in time are explained by the one theory, and not explained by the �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 27 other. On the subject of their distribution in space to-day, or geographical distribution, Mr. A. R. Wallace is our great authority. lie is an evolutionist, and has shown in his beautiful works upon the Malay Archipelago and upon islands how the manner in which plants and animals are dis­ tributed is fully explained by the hypothesis of the origin of species by natural selection. As to the facts of palaeon­ tology, or the arrangement of the remains of past living things in the rocks, these are also on the side of Darwin­ ism. The slow, gradual rise in complexity of structure in the organisms as we study the older rocks first, and the more recent after; the appearance of the simpler forms in the early strata, and the more highly organised in the later, are explicable and full of meaning in the light of the evolu­ tion theory. I can only take one example from the distribution of living things in space, and one of their distribution in time. In the case of the great sub-kingdom Vertebrata, the forms that are first encountered' in the rocks are not the Mammalia or members of the highest class, but the Pisces or fishes, members of the lowest; and if of these fishes the earliest instances are not the lowest, such as the lancelet, the lamprey, the hag of our seas to-day, the reason is that these lowest forms are not of such a nature as to admit of preservation. As we ascend the seiies of sedimentary strata, Amphibia appear next, then Reptilia and Aves, and lastly Mammalia. Of the Mammalia the forms first appearing are of the lowest type. Remains of the higher Mammalia, of the Primates or the order to which man belongs, are not forthcoming until com­ paratively recent strata are reached. With the plants as with the animals, the simpler forms that are capable of preservation appear first, the more complex later. The Cryptogamia or flowerless plants, such as sea-weeds and ferns, appear lower down in the rocks than the Phamogamia or flowering plants. When these last, make their appearance, the first forms that we meet with are the Monocotyledons, the class of plan sc with parallel veined leaves, such as the grasses and lilies. These are succeeded by the Dicotyledons, plants with net-veined leaves, and among-these the first forms that appear are the Gymnosperms or naked seeded plants, such as �28 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. the cone-bearing trees, in which, despite the size to which the trees often attain, the complexity of structure is much less than in the plants that have their seeds enclosed in seed-cases. The only case I can take out of the many instances furnished by the geographical distribution of living things is the case of island insects. These are, as a rule, of the same nature as the insects of the adjacent mainland, but their wings are rudimentary. On the theory of special creation this is without meaning. Why should a creator have given these beings rudimentary wings, and their fellows on the continent well-developed wings ? If the reply is, in order that they might not be blown out to sea, the question arises, “ Why, then, does he give them rudimentary wings ? ” The wings ought to have been removed altogether if the creator had been at work. But if these island insects and the insects of the mainland had a common parent at a time when the island and mainland were connected, and if after the severance of the former from the latter, the insects less developed stood a better chance of not being blown out to sea, and therefore of surviving, than their fellows with fully developed wings then natural selection comes into play, and in time, by its agency, insects with rudimentary wings are alone to be four^ ~'L'e rudiments of the wings tell us of the origin of these insect forms, and of the stages through which their ancestors have passed. • *,) Morphology.—Using that word in its widest sense as the science of structure, the facts of morphology are all so much indirect evidence for the modern view. All the old and new discoveries as to the comparative anatomy of plants and animals are in harmony with it. Studied with the aid of this luminous suggestion, a new and beautiful sig­ nificance is given to every fact in connexion with the Anatomy of living things. Here I can only mention two cases out of many; those of homology and rudimentary organs. (a) Homology.—Likeness in structure. Thus the arm and leg of man are homologous. Diverse as are their functions, the arm and leg are built on the same general plan. Why should this -be on the theory of special creation ? Or, to take a yet more remarkable case. The �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 29 twenty appendages of the twenty rings that make np the body of the lobster are all built on one fundamental com­ mon plan. The eyes, the small and large antennae, the gnawing jaws, the two pairs of delicate jaws, the three pairs of feet jaws, the forceps limbs, the four pairs of walk­ ing legs that follow these, the six pairs of swimmerets, are all homologous. And again, the three feet jaws of the lob­ ster are the homologues of the three active legs of the insect. Taking an example from the plant kingdom, we find that all parts of the ordinary flower are metamorphosed leaves. A flower is, in fact, a condensed branch. The green outer leaves or sepas; the generally colored inner leaves or petals ; the thread-like stamens or male organs with their fertilising dust or pollen ; and most internal of all, the carpels, with their contained unripe seeds, dependent for their fertilisation on the contact with the pollen—all these four parts are only modified leaves. In like manner the white underground scales of the bulb of the lily or hyacinth, the leafy structures met with at the bases of the flower-stalks of most plants, are modifications of the leaf. These facts are shown by the structure of the organs con­ cerned, by the history of their development, by the way in which at times they revert to the simple leaf condition, so that a flowsr-bud will be replaced by a tuft of ordinary green leaves. Again, still studying the plants, we find that the most aberrant forms of the vegetable kingdom are yet connected by a number of intermediate forms with the normal plants. And further, we find that even the most remark­ able and out-of-the-way structures are but modifications of the customary organs of other plants. Thus the strangelooking flower of the orchid, with its long spur, its oddlyshaped and colored labellum or lower lip, its one stamen, its remarkable rostellum, are found to be built up on the model of the normal form of flowers met with in its class. Fundamentnlfly, the orchid and the lily, with its regularity and simpliuity of parts, are modelled on the same type. ^Svery one of the six stamens of the lily, those six stamens so characteristic of the class Monocotyledons, to which the orchid and lily both belong, are reproduced in the orchid. Only one fSunen acting as a stamen, carrying the �30 THE DABWINIAN THEOBY. fertilising pollen, is present in the orchid. But all the other five are represented by certain structures, and the two side lobes of the labellum, the two parts of the clinandrum, or “bed” in which the one true anther lies, together with a thread of simple vessels running up one part of the flower, are homologues of the five missing stamens. On the theory of special creation this modifica­ tion of the same fundamental parts in different regions of the same plant, or in different plants, is unintelligible. On the theory of descent with modification, it is under­ standable. Here once more nobody will say that such arrange­ ments are impossible on the theory of special creation. But everyone must admit that they are far more understandable on the theory of descent with modification. (6) Rudimentary Organs.—In most plants and animals occur structures that are apparently of no use to the pos­ sessor. These rudimentary organs are explained very satisfactorily by the Darwinian theory. The hairs on our body generally are full of meaning when we reflect that probably they are the remnant of the hair covering of an ancestral form. When once the little red fold in the inner angle of the eye of man is shown to be connected by innumerable gradations with the third eyelid of birds, it acquires a deep interest. To the special creationist these organs and their thousand fellows are a difficulty that is, I think, insurmountable. They are a mute appeal to the common sense of mankind. Scarcely a plant or animal exists of any complexity of structure that does not present rudimentary organs, that is organs so aborted and reduced that they can be of no functional value. The presence of such organs is wholly inexplicable on any other theory that has yet been enun­ ciated, save that of Darwin. For a special creator to specially create organs that are of no use whatever in a living being is a waste of time and of material. But when animals or plants have evolved by gradual modification from other forms, we should expect to find them present­ ing traces of organs that were better developed and useful in their ancestors, but that have died out more or less completely in the course of modification. The illustration given above, in the case of the orchid, �! Im 1111 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. ;x 31 is a case in point. Here also the little thread of spiral vessels that runs up the front of the column in the orchid flower that is formed by the union of the stamen and carpel parts of the flower, is the rudiment of one of the six stamens of the ordinary Monocotyledon. Or, again, consider the case of the fox-glove and its allies. These plants have four stamens. But the members of the orders most nearly allied to the fox-glove order have five stamens. Now, the rudiment of the fifth stamen is always to be found in the fox-glove and its fellows. In the alimentary canal of man is a part called the caecum. After the stomach follows, in the human being, the intestine. This is at first narrow, and is called the small intestine ; it is afterwards of greater diameter, when it is called the large. When the small joins the large intestine it does not join it end on. The former runs into the side of the latter, so as to leave on one side a small blind part, a cul de sac, whilst on the other the main tube of the alimentary canal continues. This blind part is the caecum (ccecus— blind). A small organ in man, it presents a small extension of itself called the appendix vermiformis, or worm-shaped appendage. The caecum has length 2-| inches, and its breadth is about the same as its length. The appendix vermiformis varies in length from 3 to 6 inches, whilst its diameter is about that of a quill. This rudimentary caecum in the higher animals represents a very large organ in the lower. Thus, in many of the lower Mammalia, as e.g. the rabbit, the caecum is of great length, and probably has a function of great extent and importance. Its presence in the higher animals is evidence of their origin from ancestral forms in which the caecum was well developed and of significance. (5) Embryology.—The development of the living thing from the first and simplest condition until the complete adult condition is reached. Every animal and every plant that is not of the very simplest organisation in its com­ plete state, begins life as the simplest of organisms, and passes through stage after stage of ever increasing com­ plexity until the final form is reached. Why should this be, on the theory of special creation ? But on the theory of the origin of species by variation, natural selection, descent with modification, this is exactly what we should �32 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. expect to find. The human being is at first but a piece of protoplasm, later a cell, a pair of cells, 4, 8, 16, 32, a mass of cells, a bag containing a liquid, and so on through a long series of gradations, every one of which has its parallel in one of the lower forms of animals. For some time there is no indication that a vertebrate animal is evolving. Even when that is clear the kind of vertebrate is uncertain; and when at last we know that a mammal is developing, unless we knew within what parent the de­ velopment is going on, we could not affirm whether it was man or ape- until much later. At one time in the life of the human being there are structures in no wise differing from the gill arches of the fish. Nay, we carry in our necks as grown men and women a bone, the hyoid, supporter of the tongue, that is the homologue of the fishes' branchial apparatus. What a beautiful meaning has this progressive development of the individual to the evolu­ tionist ! It is an epitome of the history of the race. The higher animal, the highest animal, passes rapidly in a few years through stages that represent those traversed by ancestral forms in the unthinkable ages of the past. With the plant the same set of phenomena is to be seen. Every one of the more highly organised plants begins life as a piece of protoplasm. This becomes a cell, and this cell passes through stages of development that are representa­ tive of the complete condition of the lower members of the vegetable kingdom. The oak or the rose is at first but a unicellular plant, differing in no essential of structure from the simplest alga. In this place it will be well to explain the two terms ontogeny and phylogeny. <ov, ovtos (on, ontos) = a being ; ycwaw (gennao) = I produce. Ontogeny is the develop­ ment of the individual. It is the synonym for embry­ ology, and is the name for the series of changes tra­ versed by the living being in passing from the simple condition of its first appearance up to the complete adult condition. </>yxXov (phulon) = a stem. . Phylogeny is the development of the race, that is, the series of changes through which the ancestors of the plant or animal of to­ day have passed in the course of the ages. If the theory of special creation held sway among scientific men, there could be no science of phylogeny. Ontogeny would be a �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 33 conceivable study. But it is the facts of ontogeny very largely that have forced men of science to the conclusion that evolution is the truth. The study of the development of the individual living thing adds daily evidence in favoi of the theory cf descent. Every fact that the embryologist adds to our sum of knowledge is in harmony with that theory. So clearly is this recognised by biologists, that they have eunciated at the present time a generalisation at which I hinted above. That is, that the ontogeny of any living thing is an epitome of its phylogeny. Every stage in the history of the development of a plant or animal to-day represents a stage in the development of its ancestral forms in the past. (6) Prophecy.—Ajo. hypothesis has passed into the region of fact when a prophecy based on it is found to be accurate. This is, with the multitude, a final proof that they accept even when any number of such proofs as those mentioned above are rejected. The theory of gravitation received its crowning piece of evidence when, reasoning on that theory, astronomers directed their telescopes to a part of the heavens were as yet no planet had been observed, in the expectation that there a planet should be, and found Neptune. And when Professor Huxley, reasoning onr' Evolution, as he studied the teeth of the horse and its allies, stated that a particular kind of tooth had probably existed in some dead animal, and that very kind of tooth was afterwards found among the rocks, the theory of descent with modifi­ cation rested on a more secure basis than ever. Reasoning on the theory of gravitation, Adams and Leverrier calculated that certain erratic movements of Uranus must be due to a planet in a particular place in the heavens. The very night (September 23, 1846) that Galle, of Berlin, heard the result of the calculation from Leverrier, he turned the telescope of the Berlin observatory to the part of the heavens indicated by the calculation based on the theory, and found the planet Neptune, farthest away from the sun of all known planets ; its distance, 2,750 millions of miles ; its diameter, 37,000 miles. The theory of the evolution of species by variation and natural selection has also been applied deductively. Le/ n �34 THE DARVTNIAN THEORY. us take once again the instance already more than once mentioned, the case of the orchid flower. Darwin, believ­ ing that the orchid was no special creation, but that it had arisen from a parent common to it and other Monocotyle­ dons, was encountered by the fact that only one stamen was present in this flower, although most Monocotyledons had six. Reasoning deductively on his own great induc­ tion, he began to look for the other stamens, By a series of delicate dissections and observations of the development of the plant, he succeeded in finding the representatives of the five vanished stamens. And this is but one case of the many in which a biologist or zoologist, basing his calcula­ tions on the hypothesis of Darwin, has looked for certain structures that had not yet been observed, and has found them. The theory of the origin of species by natural selec­ tion is in truth a lamp to the feet of the naturalist, a guide to him in all his ways. Reasoning on the theory of Evolution, a typical tooth was pictured that probably belonged to some extinct animal, ancestor of the horse and its allies of to-day. The facsimile of this theoretically-constructed tooth was after­ wards found as a fossil in the Pliocene and older Miocene rocks, and the animal to which it belonged was named Hipparion. Every contest between two rival hypotheses can only be decided by an appeal to fact. Sentiment does not enter into the question. Here, then, are two hypotheses; the one of special creation, the other of the origin of species by variation, natural selection, descent with modification. They are not only antagonistic. They are mutually exclusive. Difficulties attend both, but the difficulties attendant on the old theory are overwhelming, whilst those that environ the new are in no case insurmountable. When we turn to the question of fact, we find that of evidence for special creation there is not a particle. Not a single piece of evidence, direct or indirect, is forthcoming on behalf of the doctrine of intervention from without. On the other hand, direct evidence of the origin of species by natural selection is not wholly wanting, whilst the indirect is incredible in its amount and in its importance. As to direct evidence, I think we may fairly argue that tbc observed variations in plants and animals under man’s �THE DABWINIAN THEOBY. 35 ♦visdietion, and the production of varieties so many ip number and so different in nature one from the other, are of this order. And the facts of embryology also appear to me to be of the direct o?der. For when we desire to see a case of special creation none is forthcoming. But when we desire to see a case of the evolution of a complex organic form, we have only to turn to the development of a highlyorganised plant or animal. In some twenty or more years we actually see a human being evolve from the condition of a single cell to that of a thoughtful, active man oj woman. Of indirect facts in favor of the hypotheses of Darwin there is no end. Some attempt has been made by him ai-4 by those that follow him to group the facts. Whilst, there’ fore, we begin by saying that every fact that has been observed has been on the side of the modern view, we may "cmind ourselves that the great principle of the conservalon of energy, now so firmly established, if violated by an -ct of special creation, is in harmony with the idea of the evolution of species; that our systems of classification, with 'heir over-lapping and dovetailing <2 individual groups, are upon the one theory only the expression of an arbitrary and aimless act of will, are on the other a genealogical tree of all living ; that the special-creation theory affords no satisfactory explanation of he appearance of the simplex forms of living things in t^e earlier and in the older rocks, fallowed by the appearance of more complex ones as thamore recent rocks arc studied, whilst this progressive advance in organisation is to be expected "by the evolution­ ist ; that the'distr; '^ution of living things on the surface of the earth at th- present day is explicable only on the scientific view , that the facts of the anatomy of plants and animals are :n harmony with, and are full of significance ca, the theory of Darwin ; that such facts as the presence of rudimentary organs, and the cases of homology or like­ ness of structure without necessarily analogy or likeness of function are meaningless on any other theory than this ; that the development of a living being from the simplest conditions through more and more complex ones until the final condition for the particular plant or animal is attained appears to be an epitome of the ancestral history of the Vving being and is in direct contradiction to the special �36 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. creation hypothesis; that this great induction as to the origin of species, an induction from innumerable facts, is found not to fail whenever it is applied deductively; that, in short, reasoning on it, certain phenomena are expected, and these phenomena are actually fofind. When we reflect on all this, it is impossible for anyone who deals with these questions in the true scientific spirit, to hesi­ tate for a moment as to which of the two theories is more likely to be true. “ Chapter IV.—ITS HISTORY. The Darwinian theory, received at first with a storm of disapprobation and railing, is now accepted by the scien­ tific world at large. In this, the closing chapter of a pamphlet, I can only indicate very briefly the way in which the ideas of Darwin were and are met. Originally the most frequent weapon employed was ridi­ cule. In ordinary society his claims as a thinker were dismissed with such phrases as, “ Oh, yes, says we come from apes”; and several publications, such as “Our Blood Relations ” and “ The Loves of the Gorillas,” in­ dicate by their title the methods adopted by their writers in dealing with the new generalisation. Even at the present time there are some speakers and writers who think that they can slay a great idea by jests that only recoil on themselves. A few men, grossly ig­ norant of science generally and of Darwin’s conceptions especially, still derive satisfaction and pecuniary profit from sneers and mockings addressed to Sunday-school children, or to the tea-meetings of the credulous. Men on the very verge of the grave are yet not unwilling to spend the last hours of their lives in sorry and unseemly jesting about those great matters; and ministers of religion are still to be found who will permit their churches to be used for the purpose of treating with buffoonery a question to which all men of culture aie giving thoughtful attention, and on which the men of science have decided in favour of the man whose teaching is ridiculed. (. . . �THE DARWINIAN THEORY 37 So embittered and unfair are many of the opponents of Darwin in the early time, that his own care is actually used as an argument against him. The Quarterly Review of July, 1860, complains quite pathetically of his want of dogmatism, and appears to think that because Darwin only says, “ I think ” that species are the result of natural causes, he is less credible than a clergyman who says, “ I know ” that the writer of Genesis knew accurately the mind of the infallible god; and a Rev. F. 0. Morris, perhaps the most amusing, and certainly the most ignorant assail­ ant of Darwinism, devotes two or three pages of his “ All the Articles of the Darwinian Faith ” to a list of phrases snch as—“ I believe,” “ I think,” “ It is possible," taken from the “ Origin of Species.” Some of the attacks are anonymous, and the writers of these must now congratulate themselves on their superior acuteness as compared with the want of wisdom on the part of others who were foolish enough to put their names to their lucubrations. I must rescue one of these anony­ mous beings from oblivion. He is too funny to be left alone, and his words are an apt motto for Christian Evidence persons, who without any scientific qualification attempt to deal with this subject. They should be written on the forehead of every one of these, and of every priest who as a priest, and not as a scientific man, presumes to give an opinion on Darwinism. *• It certainly has seemed to me the height of presump­ tion for one, without scientific or literary acquirements, to attempt to refute the theory of so distinguished and universally admired an author as Mr. Darwin—a theory which has met with so much support from clever and en­ lightened men, and which men, far cleverer and more experienced than myself, though disapproving and dis­ agreeing with it, have not attempted to refute.” Never­ theless our tyro, as he calls himself, moans over Darwin’s misfortune in espousing an “ untenable theory,” and placidly reminds the great philosopher that “ God has bidden many things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.” A few scientific men of repute opposed the teaching of Darwin at first. A yet smaller number still oppose. As .ustances of permanent opposition on the part of men of �38 THE BAMWINIAN THEORY. distinction Si biological science, I mention the names ot Ara* siz, Beale, St. George Mivart. There are other names <.hat could be given, of men such as Lyell and Owen, who opposed at first but gave in their allegiance afterwards, and of scientific men such as Houghton, who, unskilled in biological science gave adverse verdicts on a matter on which they were not qualified to speak. As to Agassiz, a sentence from the Rev. Dr. Peabody’s funeral sermon on this great zoologist settles the whole question in his case. “ His repugnance to Darwinism grew in great part from his apprehension of its atheistical tendency.” Dr. Beale is known as a religious man and a reader of papers at the Victoria Institute, whose object is the reconciliation of science with the holy scripture. St. George Mivart is a Roman Catholic. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, in each of *h« three cases mentioned, opposition to the views of Darwin has been due to the warping of the mind of the individual person by the influence of religion. Agassiz could not have brought to bear on the great questions at issue a clear and unprejudiced reason if he dreaded that his adhesion to one side in the argument would tell against the religious belief that he held so dear. Dr. Beale, again, is one of the school rhpidly passing away, that is godly first and natural afterwards. He makes his science subordinate to his theology. St George Mivart is a devout member of the faith that to-day, as in the days of Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, sets its face against all new truth, the faith that would, were it possible, to-day imprison and burn a Darwin as readily as it imprisoned a Galileo and burnt a Bruno. On the other hand, not a single biologist whose views on religion have not been of a pronounced nature has opposed the ideas of Darwin. The name of Asa Gray, botanist of America, must be noted us that of a Darwinian who believes the truth of Natural Selection to be reconcilable with the theories of theo? <gy. He believes in Evolution. But he believes ip as part of the plan of god. His ideas are in the ma those of Mr. G. St. Clair as given in his “ Darwinism and Design.” But with few exceptions, the scientific thought of every country to-day is with Darwinism. In scientifi' �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 39 papers, magazines, reviews and at the meetings of scientific societies—the matter is no longer one of discussion. The Darwinian hypothesis is regarded as a fact equally assured with that of gravitation, and the reasonings and induc­ tions of all biologists are based on and guided by this great truth, still rejected by the really religious people. I use the phrase “ really religious people ” because, as 1 shall show presently, the churches are now changing front on this question. But the real believers, the Booths, Moodys, Sankeys, Spurgeons, are as virulent against the truth as ever. The way in which the papers regarded the suggestions of Darwin may be gathered from one or two extracts. I will only refer to the Times, the Saturday Review, and the Quarterly, of secular papers. The Times, in reviewing the “ Origin of Species ” at the end of 1859 was cautious and critical in the true scientific spirit. But the appearance of the 11 Descent of Man” in 1871 quite threw the “ leading journal ” off its balance. I should imagine that the two reviews were written by two different men. I quote three or four delicious sentences : “We wish we could think that these speculations were as innocuous as they are un­ practical and unscientific, but it is too probable that if unchecked they might exert a very mischievous influence. ... A man incurs a great responsibility who, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of such a book. He ought to be capable of supporting them by the most con­ clusive evidence of facts. To put them forward on such incomplete evidence, such cursory investigation, such hypo­ thetical arguments as we have exposed, is more than un­ scientific, it is reckless.” The Saturday Review is interesting as putting very clearly the recognition twenty-five years ago of the assault made by Darwinism on religion. “ It tends to trench upon the territory of established religious belief.” And the closing words of this article may be quoted as showing how com­ pletely the writer, a representative of a large school, was a partisan rather than a judge. “ No conceivable amount of evidence derived from the growth and structure of animals and plants would have the slightest bearing upon our convictions in regard to the origin of conscience or �40 THE DABWINIAN THEOBY. man’s belief in the supreme being and the immortality of his own soul.” The words are strong, even for a Saturday Reviewer. “ No conceivable amount of evidence,” “ the slightest bearing,” “ our convictions.” This is the spirit in which th6 reviewer deals with a scientific question. It is true that the writer would urge probably that the rejection of the evidence is rejection on his part because it is evidence derived from animals and plants, and not from man. But surely man is an animal, and if he is only “ a little lower than the angels,” he is also only a little higher than the beasts. Any evidence derived from his nearest allies must have a very direct bearing on every function of his body, even if the function be that of the nervous system, and even if it have to do with such intricate questions as the origin of conscience and man’s belief in god. But the Saturday Reviewer has convictions, and therefore is not open to conviction, and on his convictions, as on those of so many people, “ no conceivable amount of evidence ” will have the “ slightest bearing.” The Quarterly Review is very interesting. First it falls foul of Darwin for his “ loose statements and unbounded speculation.” “ On what, then, is the new theory based ? We say it with unfeigned regret in dealing with such a man as Mr. Darwin, on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded assumptions.” Then, in a passage of great moment to us, it puts the antagonism between Darwinism and religion very clearly. “ Now we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely in­ compatible, not only with singlb expressions in the word of god on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but.... with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject matter. Man’s derived supremacy over the earth; man’s power erf articulate speech ; man’s gift of reason ; man’s free will and respon­ sibility ; man's fall and man’s redemption • the incarnation of the eternal son ; the indwelling of the eternal spirit— all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion oi the brute origin of him who was created in the image of god and redeemed by the eternal son.” Finally the Quarterly indulges in a most unfortunate hope as to �THE DARWINIAN THEORY 41 the fate of the theory. “ We trust that Sir Uharles Lyell abides still by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help, and with that of his brethren, this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was . .. the “Vestiges of Creation.’ ” The words I quote were written m 1860. The 9th edition of Lyell’s “ Principles of Geology” was issued in 1853. In this the great geologist gave his opinion against the theory of Darwin. But in his 10th edition, 1868, Lyell subscribes to the Darwinian hypothesis. Nothing is more beautiful or more pathetic in the whole range of science to my thinking than this confession of an old m3n, after fifteen years deliberation, that he was wrong in the past, and that he had altered his views on a point of such magnitude as the question of the “ Origin of Species."' I quote from the 9th edition two sentences: “ Let us now proceed to consider what is defective in evidence and what fallacious in reasoning in the grounds of these strange conclusions. . . . From the above considera­ tions it appears that species have a real existence in nature; and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and organisations by which it is now distinguished.” Both these sentences are omitted in the 10th edition, and in this edition, amidst a large quantity of details and of reasoning that is added to what had appeared in its predecessors, the following sentences occur : “ We feel disposed at once to declare a theory which is in harmony with so many facts must be true. . . . Such a relationship accords well with the theory of Variation and Natural Selection, but with no other hypothesis yet suggested for explaining the origin of species.” . I cannot do better for myself, for my readers, and for the fame of the great geologist, than quote in full the beautiful passage in the 10th edition of his Principles, in which he speaks of the reception of this new truth and of all new truth by the unbelievers who call themselves religious. The words are very solemn. “ We are some­ times tempted to ask whether the time will ever arrive when science shall have obtained such an ascendency in the education of the millions that it will be possible to welcome new truths instead of always looking upon them with fear and disgust, and to hail every important victory �42 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. gained over error instead of resisting the new discovery long after the evidence in its favor is conclusive. The motion of our planet round the sun, the shape of the earth, the existence of the antipodes, the vast antiquity of our globe, the distinct assemblages of species of animals and plants by which it was successively inhabited, and, lastly, the antiquity and barbarism of primeval man—all these generalisations, when first announced, have been a source of anxiety and unhappine£3. The future now opening before us begins already to reveal new doctrines, if possible more than ever out of harmony with cherished associations of thought. It is therefore desirable, when we contrast ourselves with the rude and superstitious savages whc preceded us, to remember, as cultivators of science, that the high comparative place which we have reached in the scale of being has been gained step by step by a conscien­ tious study of natural phsenomena, and by fearlessly teach­ ing the doctrines to which they point. It is by faithfully weighing evidence with regard to preconceived notions, by earnestly and patiently searching for what is true—not what we wish to be true—that we have attained that dig­ nity, which we may in vain hope to claim through the ranks of an idoal parentage.” Turning now to the religious papers I can only make reference to one or two. The Evangelical Magazine in reviewing a book against Darwinism by an obscure clergyman named Lyon, writes: “ The writer of this little volume brings logic, scientific knowledge, and wit to bear in the exposition of Mr. Darwin’s fallacies, and sup­ plies an admirable refutation of his theories.” The Christian World, dealing with the same work, tells us that “ From some previous acquaintance with the sub­ ject, I hesitate not to pronounce ‘ Homo versus Darwin ’ a complete refutation of the assumptions and mischievous speculations of Darwin.” Good Words published an article that I grieve to say bore the honored name of Sir David Brewster. It is a sad instance of how the physicist is not competent to deal with these biological questions, and least of all when his mind is warped by religion. Brewster calls the speculations of Darwin “ speculations which trench on sacred ground, which run counter to the universal convictions of mankiud �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 43 poisoning the fountains of science, and disturbing the serenity of the Christian world.” He names them “dan­ gerous and degraded.” He states that Darwin’s “ reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalisa­ tions seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them.” And in a pas­ sage for which all Freethinkers will be for ever grateful, he writes: “We cannot suppose that he intended to under­ mine the foundations of natural and revealed religion; but, we cannot conceal our conviction that the hypothesis, which he makes it the object of his life to support, has a tendency to expel the Almighty from the universe, to degrade the god-like race to which he has committed the development and appreciation of his power, and to render the revelation of his will an incredible superstition.” But the most comic of all these comic papers is, as we might expect—the War Cry not being at the time in existence—the Catholic World. This paper does not hesitate to call Darwiu the Devil. This it does by implication in the following passage : “ Like Satan, who was cast from heaven in a moment, when desirous of elevating his throne to a level with that of god, so man falls and degrades him­ self when he becomes too proud to listen to god’s word, making reason the supreme and sole criterion of truth and certitude and actually in this : “ Like the Devil, he some­ times assumes the garment of light, and puts on an appear­ ance of virtue.” Anon, the Catholic World declares for the antagonism of the Bible to Darwin: “ He sets aside all revealed truth. He knows nothing about the simple and sublime narrative in the first chapter of Genesisand com­ forts itself and its readers by a prophecy : “ We think there is little to fear that its frivolous arguments will ex­ cite anything but laughter and ridicule among men of solid erudition.” I now pass to the consideration of the position of the clergy on the question. first that position was wholly and virulently antagonistic. Later, as those robbers of men’s birth-rights, those poisoners of life at its very source, saw that the truth was once again too strong for their falsehoods, they repeated the shifting of ground that they have had to execute so many times. To-day the astute amcng them agree with Darwinism, in everything save �44 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. its complete application to man. This they red. st and wiK resist, for they know that when once all people understand that every structure and function of the human race, even the structure of the nervous system, and that function of the norvous system called mind, are of entirely natural origin, the days for the picking of the people’s pockets by the priests will be at an end. I can only quote one or two choice extracts from clerical utterances given forth early in the history of the contro­ versy. First, let me pay tribute to the courage of the three clergymen, who at the British Association meeting of 1869 actually dared to oppose the Darwinian hypothesis. They were the-Venerable Archdeacon Freeman, the Rev. Dr. McCann, and the irrepressible F. 0. Morris. The nature and effect of their efforts may be gathered from the comments of the President of the Biological section, Professor Busk, a man never identified in any way with attacks on religion. Said he: “ It was easy to set up a kind of idol and knock it down, calling it Darwinism. But really it had nothing to do with a theory of Darwinism.” At the end of the discussion he remarked : “Not any one of the three authors had shown any knowledge of what the Darwinian theory really was.” It was at the same meeting of the British Association that the late Bishop of Oxford maintained the traditions of his order by sneering at the new truth. He met with a rebuke from Professor Huxley that even a clergyman and a bishop must have felt: “ If I had to choose my father from an ape or a man capable of employing his great knowledge and easy eloquence in railing at those who consecrate their lives to the proving of the truth, I should prefer to be the son of the humble ape.” These are published utterances. But every reader who had arrived at years of reason and understanding by 1859 remembers how the clergy, as a body, railed and raved. I call to mind a sermon against Darwin that I heard as a boy, and the closing sentence rings in my ears now. It was typical of so much of the blatant, priestly outcry against the man and his works. “ Believe in Darwin,” cried the excited orator. “ Not I. I never read a word of him.” I take an extract from “ Homo versus Darwin,” by the Mr Lyon mentioned above, as it puts unmistakably the �THE DABWINIAN THEOHY. 46 ideas of the religious world as late even as 1871: “ Praoticallv Darwinism, as it has been called in the latest exposition of it, is Atheism.” The Bev. J. H. Laing in the same year publishes “ Darwinism Refuted.” The Rev. W. Mitchell, VicePresident of the Victoria Institute, writes: “ Any theory which comes in with an attempt to ignore design as manifested in god’s creation, is a theory, I say, wt^ph attempts to dethrone god. This the theory of Darwin does endeavor to do. . . . So far as I can understand the arguments of Mr. Darwin, they have simply been an endeavor to eject out of the idea of evolution the personal work of the deity.” The Rev. F. 0. Morris says : “ Does the good man think we are simpletons to be befooled by such trifling as this ? And it is with it and such as it, a scientific book forsooth! that our professors and men of sciende would, if they could, beguile believers and over­ turn religion. This is the book that has been the Will-o’the-wisp that has led away the weak-minded into the Slough of Despond of a shallow and contemptible Infidelity.” And in a volume of Essays, published under the direction of Cardinal Manning, the Roman Catholic Church spits its venom at the great thinker and his followers. The theory is “degrading” of Darwin and those that think with him.” Mr. Laing writes in this essay : “ Whether this fallacious process of the pleading proceeds from knavish design, or, as I think it does in this case, from mere imbecility of mind, it renders equally untrustworthy the pretended guides who make use of it.” More coarsely, Mr. Laing sums us all up as a “ shallow multitude, strangers to mental discipline,” and in an indignant outburst as “ buzzards.” He has, however, one true idea of Darwinism : “ This is the doctrine for the sake of which, and its like, we are asked by its ad­ mirers to banish religion as an incubus from the hearts of children, and treat the name of the creator as an intruder.” And he also prophecies : “ (This) sketch may perhaps enable any one with his wits about him, to see his way clearly enough through the pretensions of this ridiculous book.” Let us never forget that this is the same Church a prelate of ^vhich, the Bishop of Salford, told his hearers �46 TUB DARWINIAN THEORY. in tlie year 1882, that Charles Darwin, then dead but a few days, was burning in hell. I have referred to the disingenuous change of position on the part of the Church, and the dishonesty involved in this change, unaccompanied as it is by any renunciation of the ;laims that the Church yet makes on men. Nothing I can write jjcould speak more plainly than the words of Canon Liddon. I quote from the introduction of his sermon entitled “ The recovery of St. Thomas.” In this introduc­ tion he speaks of Darwin and his theory thus : “ The pre­ sent writer cannot, of course, express any opinion whatever as to the scientific value of Mr. Darwin’s application of his general theory to the ‘ Descent ’ of man. ... If the Church should hereafter teach that this ‘ formation ’ was not a momentary act, but a process of development con­ tinued through a long series of ages, she would not vary the traditional interpretation so seriously as was done in the case of passages which appeared to condemn in terms the teaching of Galileo. Nor would the earlier description of the preation of man in the sacred record present any greater difficulty. It is very far from clear that the Dar­ winian hypothesis has so established itself as to make such a modified interpretation necessary; only let it be con­ sidered that here, as elsewhere, the language of the Bible is wider than to be necessarily tied down to the terms of a particular account of man’s natural history.” 1 repeat that no words of mine could bring before the mind of the reader more clearly than do those of Canon Liddon the depths of infamy into which the Church has sunk. The gross, the unblushing dishonesty of a body that pretending either to infallibility in itself, or in its head, or in its book, or in its god, can after it, or its head, or its book, or its god, have taught for centuries certain falsehoods, calmly turn round and say that the refutation of these falsehoods does not affect its position; such iniquity it is difficult to qualify in words. Nor is any member of that body free ftom the charge of dishonesty who does not repudiate with disdain the conduct of its representatives. Least of all is the priest, be he Canon Liddon or some lesser man (I mean lesser in position, not in honesty), free from this charge who deliberately writes and issues a passage Buch as that I have just quoted. �THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 4V The honest men are those like the irrepressible Mr. Morris, whom I find even in this year of grace, 1884, writing in country newspapers against the Darwinian craze. These are at least honest. They see that Darwinism and the supernatural are incompatible, just as the principle of the ,c<>n'ervation of energy and the supernatural are incom­ patible. To all religious persons who think that the theory of Darwin is in harmony with revealed religion, I commend, in addition to the passages already given, these concluding extracts, from a sermon by the Rev. B. G. Johns. I re­ mind them that his words are those that the religious of twenty years ago would have endorsed almost to a man. 4‘ They are far more curiously anxious to prove man’s nearness to the beasts that die than to accept his birth from the breath of a living god, as meant, and made to be im­ mortal. So monstrous, so incredible does this seem, that it * mnds like a jest; yet this, brethren, is neither time nor place for jesting, least of all with such things as eternal life and eterr al death, the birth, the destiny of the whok race of man. It ‘s no jest, brethren, but the grave and shame­ ful teaching of a book, now put forth by one of the men of science of this very age; calmly put forth as the inevit­ able and incomparable result of long, careful, and ex­ haustive study. .... And if it be so, if the incredible boast of science be true, our text is a lie. And if the text be false, the whole book in which the words are shrined is unworthy of belief ; the whole framework of the Book of Life falls to pieces, and the revelation of god to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare. It is interesting to note that Mr. Johns is chaplain to the school for the blind. I have, I think, shown that the early reception of the theory of Darwin by the majority of people was a very hostile one; that the religious world was antagonistic to it; that the clergy were especially bitter against it; that everyone saw at first that there was no reconciliation between the theory and the bible, while most heldthere was no reconciliation between it and religion generally. I have shown also something of the dishonest change of front of the clergy, and as I end, have but to remind my readers that « e^ery country hut England the Darwinian hyDOthesis ha® �48 THE DARWINIAN THEORY. passed into the region of accepted truths ; that by the scien tific men of England it is regarded as in that fortunate position ; that nations sorrowed at his death as at that of their own citizens ; that Du Bois Raymond could call him when dead “ the Copernicus of the organic world that Huxley wrote of him, “ He found a great truth trodden under foot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world ; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts* irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated! with the common thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by those who would revile, but dare not.” What a gap is made in the world by the death of this man ! Every nation has lost a citjzen—a citizen that has done true work and has deserved well of the Republic. ^He leaves behind him a vast and ever-increasing army of scientific children. All the young thought of the day is with him. The duty, the joy of these, and of us who are ff them, will be to work out yet further the noble ideas received by us from him, and in some measure to endeavor by our numbers, our devotion to truth, our enthusiasm, toatone for the irreparable loss the world has sustained in his death. �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. By EDWARD A VELING, D.Sc. Chapter I.—GENERAL INTRODUCTION. The three chapters that follow this one are a sequel to the four already published under the title “ The Darwinian Theory.” In discussing the meaning of that theory, the difficulties that encounter its students, the evidence on which iL rests and the history of the hypothesis of Darwin, the attempt was made to give in language at once popular and accurate some idea of the scientific belief of to-day as to the origin of the many species of plants and animals that lived in the past or are living now. As the greater includes the less, the Darwinian hypothesis of the origin of species covers the particular case of the origin of man. But man has only quite of late learned to regard himself as amenable to the same general laws, no more and no less, as the rest of Nature. Hence, even when the first outburst of ignorance against the principles taught by Darwin had in part died away, there were many who, vhilst accepting with a tardy grace and with something of reserve those principles as affecting plants and the lower animals, regarded them as having no bearing on the question of. the origin of the human race. Darwinism was all very well in respect to the lower forms of living things, but an regarded Man (with a very large M)—Oh, no ! The great naturalist, no more afraid of the conclusions to which his generalisations led than in love with them, applied, the principle of Natural Selection and that of Sexual Selectionto man. Sexual Selection, briefly, works thus. In the ani­ mal kingdom males predominate in number over the females �2 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. of particular species. The females have the opportunity of selecting certain favored males, to the exclusion of others. Hence there is a struggle among the males for the possession of the females. The arbiter is often brute force. Very often the decision of the female is determined by other considera­ tions. More beautiful coloring or sweeter song or more artistic skill, e.g., may render certain males more acceptable than others less gifted and less happy. The sexual selection of the males that vary in some special direction as to hue, shape, voice-ability or even bodily strength results in these males having offspring, by whom the variation that has led to the selection of their fathers will be inherited, in whom it may be intensified and, in their after generations, fixed. I have no intention in the following chapters of applying in detail the principles of Natural and Sexual Selection to man. Their application by our mastei' led to the conclusion upon his part that man had evolved from the lower animals. My purpose is rather to give some of the evidence, direct and indifect, that points in this direction. Of the magnitude of the question as to whence man has come there is no need to speak. That solved, the questions what man is to-day and whither he moves become possible of solution. Until we are quite clear as to the origin of man, we cannot hope to deal satisfactorily with his present con­ ditions, or to anticipate at all definitely his destiny. To the question, “ Whence comes man ?” only two answers are forthcoming. We have to choose between the reply of religion and of the.Bible, and the reply of science and of Darwin. Either man is a special creation, and that in the image of God (Gen. i., 27), or he is the result of evolution or development from some lower form. Between these two alternatives there is no mean, and there is no peace. One is true, the other false. A question of this kind can only be solved by an appeal to evidence, and the best judges of that evidence are scientific men. One word as to the judges ere we turn to the evidence that is to be laid before them. Every man and woman of common sense has the right to an opinion, anq the expres­ sion of it. . But the expression is only worthy of respect at the hands of others inasmuch as it is that of an individual, unless it comes from one who, by his scientific knowledge, gives that which he says a generic value. The only class �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 3 tnax can speak in any sense ex cathedra on this question is the class of men and women to whom biological questionsare familiar. Nevertheless we have the clergy, with their usual presumption, not only giving, but declaiming their opinions on the scientific question of man’s origin. Once more let it be repeated that the clergyman as a clergyman has no voice in this matter whatever. You might as well ask a smuggler his opinion on the Excise Acts. For the evidence bearing on the question in discussion. It must be either direct or indirect. On this point the reader is referred to pp. 22, 23 of the “Darwinian Theory.” All that is there said in respect to the want of all evidence, direct or indirect, for the creation of species holds in respect to the special creation of man in the image of god. Of this there is literally no evidence whatever. On the other hand, just as there is an immense, an increasing, a conclusive body of evidence, mainlv indirect, in favor of the evolution of species, a like body of evidence exists in favor of the evolu­ tion of man. Some of this evidence is now to be given. In weighing it let us keep in mind two things: (1) that on the opposite side no evidence at all is forthcoming; (2) that we are studying man as a whole, not merely the highest kinds of men. In all this inquiry we have to take into account not the highest and most civilised races only, but the lowest and most degraded. It is by constantly considering only the European peoples and the contrast between them and the anthropoid or manlike apes that thoughtless people arrive at the astounding conclusion that man is infinitely superior to the lower animals. To this false conclusion the false state­ ments of religion and of the priests have also conduced. The fact is that if we study all races of man, in no single point of his anatomy, his physiology, or his psychology is man clearly marked off from the brute. Including as human all from the loftiest men and women down to the savages, to the idiots, and to th'ose ape men and women who, the children of normal human beings are themselves no more, and in many cases much less than apes, it may be asserted, without fear of con­ tradiction that in every point of structure and function there is a greater difference between man and man than between man and ape—i.e., the interval between the highest man and �4 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. the lowest man in regard to any anatomical or physiological point is greater than it is between the lowest man and the highest ape. The evidence to be given will be arranged under three heads. Anatomical facts, or those having to do with the structure of organs; physiological facts, or those having to do with the function of organs; then psychological facts, or (using the word psychology in its widest sense) those having to do with mental pheenomena. These divisions are like all the rest, artificial but useful. Especially is this artificiality noticeable in the marking off the brain functions from the rest of the body functions, and the making a distinction between psychology and the rest of physiology. The facts now to be noted are taken largely from Darwin’s “ Descent of Man.” But other authors have been laid under contribution. I ought especially to mention Dr. W. Lauder Lindsay, whose work on “ Mind in the Lower Animals,” and essays on diseases in the animal kingdom, terribly wordy as they are, contain many most useful facts. Chapter II.—ANATOMICAL FACTS. Anatomy is derived from ava (ana) = up, to/xt? (tome) = a cutting. It is the account of the structure of the body. Out of all the innumerable facts that might be given in this connexion, all pointing to man’s relationship, not only to the animals nearest to him in the scale of being, but to his relationship to others far below, some will be taken that bear on the following subjects. The hair covering of the body, the skeleton, the teeth, the blood, the brain, the ear, the eye, the muscles, the voice, the reproductive organs. In all cases let us bear in mind that the question is whether man has been created in the image of god, or whether he has risen by variation, and natural and sexual selection from some lower form of animal. 1. The hair covering.—A common objection is that the mammals below man have a covering of fur or hair that invests their bodies generally, whilst man has only the hair covering on certain parts of his body, To this objection there are many answers. �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 5 (a) We have hairs* nearly all over our body. It is true that they are rudimentary. But they are present. Hold the hand up so thab the light shines across the back of it, and the minute hairs are visible. Everywhere with the exception of the back of the extreme joints of the digits these rudimentary structures are to be seen. This is meaningless if we are made in god’s own image, as we have no evidence as to the distribution of hair on the body of deity. But if we have risen from a lower form of animal these hairs are rudiments of the coating that in our progenitors invested the body completely. [See p. 30 “Darwinian Theory.’’] (Z») In many cases the amount of hair on the body is in proportion to the animal nature of the individual. Of course this ratio cannot be said to be invariable, as certain low savage races are without hair on the body. But in most of the civilised peoples the more hairy the skin is, the lower is the type of man. The huge powerful “navvy,” whose muscular system is strongly developed, and in whom the intellectual faculties are not highly developed, has shaggy arms, legs, and chest. (c) Physiologists tell us that the human embryo or foetus before birth is covered with a soft down called the lanugo (woolliness) that disappears after a time. This temporary covering of hair-like material is intelligible on the hypothesis of the evolution of man from a hair-covered animal. (<Z) The cases of ape-men, or microcephali. These are, as I have already said, children of normal human parents, that revert to the simian type. These monsters, with their receding foreheads, their difficulty in walking, or inability to walk, upright, their habit of swinging from piece to piece of furniture, their ape-like grimaces, are covered as to their bodies either completely, or to a great extent, with hair. 2. The skeleton.—Just as the exoskeleton (outer protective organs) or hair covering of man does not differ essentially from that of his allies, so the endoskeleton (inner protective and supporting organs of man) differs in no essential from that of his allies. Every bone, every prominence on every bone, every marking for the attachment of muscles is the same in man as in the anthropoid apes. Of course there is not much difficulty, even to the non-anatomical mind, in distinguishing the skeleton of a European from that of a gorilla. But the �6 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. difference in little details between the two would certainly not be so great as the difference between the skeletons of a European and an Andaman Islander. A somewhat apocryphal, but suggestive, story was wont to be told at Cambridge, which, so far as I know, has never seen the fierce light that beats on a published book. Two undergraduates visiting the anatomical museum came to the skeleton of a man and of a gorilla placed side by side for the purposes of student com­ parison. One of the students was an anti-Darwinian, and rather short sighted. He glided off into a sweet flow of running words upon the absurdity, not to say impropriety of dreaming for a moment that “ this, the man, could have come from that, the gorilla.” He dilated upon the enormous superiority of this to that. From these simple premisses he arrived at the conclusion that Darwin was either a fool or a rogue. Thus, for some few minutes. Then his compan._J._ tailed his attention to the fact that the labels had been ehanged, and he was praising the gorilla. To understand the thoroughness of the similarity between Vian’s skeleton and that of his allies is only possible to a skilled anatomist. To the ordinary reader the details would be as uninteresting as unintelligible. Yet a few special facts may be given that will be understood by everyone. Let us take the cases of the tail, the hyoid bone and the visceral arches. (a) The tail.—The objection as to the tail is nearly at an end. But there are still some ignorant people who think that they have disproved Evolution by asking how is it that man has no tail. In the first place man’s nearest neighbors, the anthropctd apes, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the ourangoutang, the gibbon, have no tail; or, more accurately, they have such an appendage exactly as man has. For, in the second place, man has a tail. Truly it is rudimentary. At the lower end of the vertebral column is the coccyx or os coccygis — kokkv£ (kokkux) = a cuckoo’s bill. Os = a bone. This coccyx, or os coccygis, is the remnant of the caudal appendage (canda = a tail), of the tailed animals. It is a small bone made up of three or four reduced vertebrae of no anatomical value at all. No muscles are inserted into the coccyx. Its value is genealogical. It tells us that the com­ mon ancestry of man and the man-like apes, was a tailed mammal. Sb) The hyoid bone.—This is a bone found in tha neck of �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. the human being. It is not connected with any other bon* directly. Muscles pass from it to the bones of the head and of the chest, and the tongue is attached to it. The hyoid takes its name from a letter of the Greek alphabet (the hupsilon or u) and from eiSos (eidos) = likeness. The bone has a central solid body, with two pairs of projecting horns. The horns are the greater and lesser cornua. Cornu = a horn. You can feel the larger pair of horns projecting right and left vithin the throat if you grasp your throat rather far back with the finger and thumb, so that the two digits are beneath and below the two angles of the lower jaw. That your finger and thumb are pressing the hyoid bone may be known by moving the tongue. The bony points will be found to slip away from your grasp. This little bone is the remnant of the gill-supporting apparatus of the fish. Here we have one of the cases in which bone structure in man carries us back millions on millions of years and reminds us of descent from animals that now seem too remote and too lowly to be recog­ nised as part of the family to which he belongs in the ages. The gills of the fish are supported on a series of bony arches called branchial arches. These are in pairs. No compara­ tive anatomist has the least doubt that the hyoid bone, with its two pairs of cornua, is the homologue (i.e., representative in structure), of two of those pairs of branchial arches. This leads me to my third point in this connexion. (c) The visceral arches.—Let us try to cany our minds back to the early hours of the life of the human embryo—to that strange time before its birth. Early in that life-history which begins within the organism of the mother-parent the embryo body has the front region of the side of the body quite closed, as indeed it is in the adult, whose neck of course presents no openings or clefts. But at a certain period in the embryonic life this anterior region of the lateral wall .of the body shows on each side of the body certain vertical thicken ings or ridges. These become more and more marked, ana the integument between then thins gradually away. At last the ridges are arches, and the thin regions between them are clefts. If I may use the rough comparison, the front parts of the side of the body have the appearance of a grid­ iron, the bars of which are the thick arches. These arches are the visceral or branchial arches. Viscera are internal organs Xia (branchia) = gills. The clefts between them leading �8 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. into the interior of the human being’s body are the visceral or branchial clefts. In this stage of development the embryo of man is there­ fore, as far as this region of his body is concerned, identical in structure with that of a fish. The visceral arches are the same as those that support in the fish the gills of the fish. These arches become in one or two cases part of the adult Bkeleton ; in others they never enter into that skeleton. Thus the first visceral arch becomes on each side half of the lower jaw, and at the end of it, nearer to the skull, forms one ’of the bones of the inner ear. The second and third visperal arches make up the cornua and body of the hyoid bone. The rest become obliterated as arch-structures. As to the clefts, through which in the fish passes water that has been taken into the mouth for breathing purposes, they are in man all closed up completely at a comparatively early time. It is impossille to avoid the conclusion that this remarkable series of arches and the intervening clefts represent in their transitory appearance in the human animal the more permanent condi­ tion in a piscine ancestor of man. 3. The teeth.—The whole of the history of the teeth of the Primates (the mammalian order to which man, the anthropoid apes, the baboons, the spider monkey, the lemurs, etc., belong) is so much evidence in favor of the origin of man from some lower form. We can only take the case of the wisdom teeth. These are the four last teeth in position and in date of appearance. They are at the back of the upper and lower jaws on each side. As to their time of appearance, they may appear between the age of seventeen and that of twentyfive, or they may not appear at all. Coming comparatively late in life they generally, like Charles Lamb, make up for this by leaving early. They are really useless, placed so far back in the mouth, and very soon become lost in certain cases. In many people they are either not all four cut, or even not one of them appears. Thus the present writer has only cut 1*5 of his wisdom teeth, and he is assured by dentist friends that it is not an unusual thing for none of the four wisdom teeth to emerge. What is the significance of these wisdom teeth ? If man is made in the image of god, are we to believe that—does not the whole wickedness and absurdity of the doctrine come out at the supposition ? But if we look at the shape of the jaws of man and of the Simian Primates �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 9 we eta understand what has happened. The lower jaw of man has an angle that is nearly right—i.e., the ascending posterior portion is nearly vertical, and the lower part that runs forward runs nearly horizontally. In the lower jaw of the ape that angle is an obtuse angle—i.e., the ascending part slants somewhat backwards. With such an obtuse angled lower jaw there would be room for the last or wisdom teeth to act and work on the food. But as with advancing develop­ ment the shape of the jaw altered, and the obtuse became a right angle, the wisdom teeth would be pressed upon, and would have less and less possibility of grinding the food. From disuse they are dying out. On the special creation hypothesis the wisdom teeth are a gross blunder on the part of the almighty. On the hypothesis of Evolution they are disappearing organs that were once of use to our ancestors, and their very disappearance is an argument in favor of the scientific creed. 4. The blood.—Anatomically the blood of man is not distinct from that of the higher Mammalia. Everyone is familiar with the customary reply of the medical witness in courts of justice when murder cases are the centre of interest. “ Are these marks those of blood ?”—“ Yes.” “Of the blood of a mammal?”—“Yes.” “Of the blood of a human being ?”—“ I cannot tell.” Few facts are more important witnesses as to the community of our origin with that of the “ lower ” animals than this impossibility of dis­ tinguishing between our blood and theirs. By anatomical, microscopical, chemical, or physiological investigation it is not within our power to say more than that the blood under study is that of some animal other than of the mammal tribe, other than the musk deer, other than one or two special animals, the shape or size of whose blood* corpuscles betray them at once. The murderer who says that the stains found on his or her garments are those of a bird or of a reptile lays himself open to conviction. But whoever says it is due to a rabbit, or a dog, or any ordinary mammal, can, as far as forensic medicine is concerned, be safe. This is one of the dangers that lead to the opposition of our highly-cultivated upper classes to the further advance of education among their inferiors. Whether this educational alarm will be well or ill-founded, the fact remains that no amount of microscopic or spectroscopic investigation reveals any real �10 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. difference between our blood and that of the majority of Mammalia. 5. The, brain.—This is the organ around which the battle of ignorance and prejudice against knowledge has raged most furiously. Other organs in man may be similar to those met with in the rest of the animal kingdom. But this organ of reason and of imagination, of the poetry of a Shakespere, and the power of generalisation of a Newton must be in the human race widely separated from the organs in the non­ human animals that are dignified with the same name. Precisely the same blunder that is made in comparing man generally with other animals is met with in an intensified form when the. comparison is between the human brain and that of other animals. Thus the popular idea is that the brain of man in structure, volume and weight is separated from that of his fellows as by an impassable gulf. The idea is false. But it must be admitted with the deepest regret that this false idea has been originated and fostered not only by the clergy, who are not expected to know or to do better, but even by the scientific men. Again and again it is stated in works supposed to be scientific that this great gulf is fixed between our brains and those of other Mammalia. It is therefore necessary to give my authorities for the direct con­ tradiction that I am obliged to give to this statement. (a) As to brain structure.—There is not a single convolu­ tion or depression in the brain of man that is peculiar to him. Even the convolution to which Gratiolet clung as dis­ tinctive, the supra-marginal has been found in the orang-outang, has been found to be absent in man. On this point see Bastian, “ Brain an Organ of Mind.” (b) As to brain volume.—The volume of the human brain has been found to be as much as 1,900 cubic centi­ metres (a. c. c. is about of a cubic inch). It has been found to be as low as 1,200 c. c. in ordinary adult Europeans. Now the cubical capacity of the highest anthropoid apes may be taken as 600 c. c. Here then is a difference, 1,900 — 12,00 = 700 between man and man, and a difference 1,200 — 600 = 600 only between man and ape. More than this. If we note the volume of the brains of some of the ape-men we find that they have a cranial capacity far less than that of the ordinary anthropoid ape. Thus we know of at least ten case” of beings born of human parents in �THE O.IIGIN OF MAN. 11 irhom the brain volume was less than the 600 c. c. of the apes. Name. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Gottfried Msehre ... ... Michel Sohn ... ... Frederic Sohn ... ... Conrad Shuttelndreyer ... Microcephalus of Jena ... Ludwig Racke ... ... Marguei ite Maehler ... Jean Mcegle ............... Jacques Moegle ... ... Jean Georges Moegle ... Age. 44 20 18 31 26 20 33 15 10 5 Brain Capacity. ...... ....... .... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... 555 370 460 370 350 622 296 395 272 480 (c) As to brain weight.—This is, in one way, a better test than volume, just as the amount of matter in a book or a lecture or a life is of more importance than the length of either book, lecture, or life. We may take the average weight of the brain in a European man as 49 ounces. _ That of an anthropoid ape is 15 ounces. A great interval truly between 49 and 15. But every one of the numbers between these is to be found in the list of human brain weights. Human ’ eings have been encountered the weights of whose brain have been 48, 47, 46 ounces, and so on down to 17, 16, 15,-and beyond. It is here only necessary to give two or three cases of weights less than the average in anthropoid apes. Professor Owen records a case of a microcephalous idiot, aged 22, in whom the brain weight was only 13’12. Pro­ fessor Theile one aged 26, brain weight 10-6. Professor Marshall one aged 12, brain weight 8’5. With respect tc this last case we must bear in mind that the brain weight of the child of 12 is that of the adult. Thus the average European child’s brain weight would be of 49 = 42 ounces. Once more then we find that the difference between the brain weights of man and man, 49 and 8’5, is greater than that between the brain weight of man and anthropoid apes, 49 and 15. For the verification of these numbers the student may be referred to Bastian’s “Brain as an Organ of Man,” pp. 365. 6. The ear.—The ear is one of the most variable of the organs of the human body. This is pointed out by Professor r.aeckel in his lecture on the development of the sense-organs <“ Pedigree of Man,” Lecture X.), ant will be corroborated by �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. anyone who observes the ears of any considerable collection of people, say at a theatre or a church. In some places, at all events, more instruction may be gained from the study of the ears of our companions than of the matter for the discussion of which the assembly is convened. It is not merely that they vary in length. Every detail of shape is variable. And this is, in the main, due to the fact that the sense of hearing is in man undergoing evolution. Perhaps no other function of our body is at the present time advancing so unmistakably as that of hearing. The various schools of music are only one proof of this growing extension of the auditory faculty. One particular point literally is of interest to us. On the outmost edge of our ear is a little prominence, of very variable size in different human beings. It is from a quarter to halfway down on the irregularly curved line that runs from the topmost part of the ear to the lobe at the bottom of the ear. This minute point is without a doubt the remnant of the point of the ear of the lower animals. There is in the order Primates amongst its various species and individuals every gradation between the acutely-pointed ears of some of the lower monkeys and the ear of man. 7. The eye.—Of all the many structures in this complex organ we can, as with the ear, only call attention to one. In the inner comer of our eye, is a small red fold dignified with the disproportionate name of the caruncula lachrymalis. A caruncle or wattle is one of the red folds that occur on the head of the cock. The adjective lachrymalis is given because through two minute apertures in this caruncle the tears (lachrymse) pass down into the nose cavity. The caruncle is not of so much interest to us physiologically as genealogically. It is the rudiment of the third eye-lid that at present is well developed in birds and other Verte­ brata. If the eyes of a bird are carefully watched the observer sees a kind of transverse or side-way winking. This is due to the drawing across the eye of the membrana nictitans, or winking membrane, and this membrana nictitans is the third eyelid. Here again a complete series of grada­ tions from the perfect eyelid of the owl, e.g., to the caruncula lachrymalis of man is yielded by the study of comparative anatomy. 8. Muscles.—Not one of the 200 and odd. muscles existing in the human body is peculiar to that body, Every one of them �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 13 Has been met with in the anthropoid apes, and everyone has been found to be connected with the same bones, the same parts of these bones, running in the same direction, having just the same function as in man. It is true that until recently there was a belief that a few of the many muscles did occur in man, and not in his allies, or did occur in certain of the anthropoid apes and were wanting in man. In general there are grounds for this belief, but in certain cases in the human subject, and in certain others in the Simian, these grounds are wanting. Thus, four muscles occur in all the anthropcid apes that are not generally present in man. All these four, however, have been found as varieties in the human body. Two muscles are usually present in man that are wanting in the anthropoid apes. But of these two, one is sometimes, and the other frequently absent in man. The interesting point here is that the six variable muscles are variable in man and ape. The consideration of one or two special muscles is of use. Take first those of the ear. There are three very rudi­ mentary muscles to each ear. They are so rudimentary that a skilled dissector alone can demonstrate them. One lies over, one lies in front of, the third behind the ear. That which lies over, when it contracts, raises the organ, and is therefore called the attolens aurem. Attollo — I raise, auris = ear. That which lies in front, when it contracts draws the ear forward. This is therefore called'the attrahens. A d = to, traho = I draw. That which lies behind the ear, when it contracts draws the ear backwards, and is therefore called retrahens. Re = backwards. In us not only are these muscles very rudimentary—they are almost functionless. Most human beings have no command of these structures, and even in the rare cases when movement of the ear by these small muscles does take place, the movement is generally involuntary and not attended with consciousness. The present writer has devoted a considerable am on nt. of time and trouble to the acquisition of the power of ear­ movement without success. In animals lower than man the ear-muscles are well developed and capable of considerable movement. In the non-bn man Primates these organs are very mobile. There can be little doubt that in the Simian ancestor of man, a tree-haunting animal dwelling in forests where wild beasts roamed, the ears �4 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. were also very readily movable. Safety would depend largely on the power of perceiving the slightest sound when dangs. threatened. But thousands of years of evolution have changed all that, and now the muscles of the ear are reduced to a very rudimentary condition, and only in a few cases is there any remnant of the power once so marked and so valuable to its possessor. The presence of these muscles, like all rudimentary organs, is wholly inexplicable on the special creation hypothesis On this hypothesis we are to credit the three persons of the. Trinity each with two attollentes, two attrahentes, two retrehentes aures. On the theory of descent or ascent with modi­ fication the presence of these small muscles is to be ex­ pected. To take one other case. In the lower mammals there exists in many instances just beneath the skin a very exten­ sive muscle. It runs all the length of the skin, and by its contractions moves that organ. The technical name of this muscle is the panniculus carnosus. Pannus = a garment, iculus — a diminutive, camosus «= fleshy. This is the muscle that horses and other members of the hoofed order (Ungulata) of the class Mammalia use in twitching off flies and other insects that are out of the reach of the tail. Remnants of this skin muscle are to be found in man. Indeed, the three muscles of the ear already discussed are portions of the pan­ niculus camosus, left stranded, as it were, after the general vanishing of the muscle.. Other fragments of the same structure are, however, present. Thus the muscle by which the movement of the scalp over the skull is performed by certain gifted beings—a muscle known as the occipito-frontalis, as it runs from the occipital bone at the back of the skull to the frontal or forehead bone—this also is a portion of the panniculus carnosus. And in the neck, just below the skin, is a wide but very thin sheet of muscular tissue called the platysma myoides. 7rA.arv$ (platus) = broad, pvwv (muon) = a muscle. €i8o$ (eidos) = resemblance. The platysma is attached to the clavicles or collar bones below, spreads over the whole of the neck up as far as the lower jaw. It is of no use to man. The three ear muscles and the occipito-frontalis we have seen to be practically useless to us, and the platysma myoides is, if possible, of still less utility than these. But it, ’ike the attolens aurem, attrahens aurem, and retrahens aurem/und, like the oceipito-frontalis, is of the deepest interest to everyone �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 15 but a special creationist, inasmuch as it is a reminder of our brute origin. 9. Voice organ.—As so much stress is laid on the wholly inaccurate statement that man, and man only, has the power of articulate speech, it may be noted that the structure of the larynx or voice-apparatus in man and in' the anthropoid apes is identical. The same cartilages, great and small; the same folds and ligaments ; the same complex set of muscles that, by moving the cartilages one on another, make the vocal liga­ ments tight or lax, approximate them or take them away one from another, and thus help to produce the different notes of the voice—all are present in man and apes. In the next chapter the discussion of the physiology of voice in man and other animals will be briefly undertaken. In this chapter on anatomical facts it is only necessary to repeat that in all details of structure the larynx of man and the larynx of the anthropoid apes are the same. 10. The organs of reproduction.—Under this head, also, I can only make a statement of the same nature as that just uttered. Not only in general plan, but in the minutest parti­ culars, the organs whose function is the maintenance of the species are the same in man as in the anthropoid apes. I cannot end this chapter without again reminding the reader that only the merest fraction of the immense mass of available facts has been given. Literally their name is legion. But if their number is practically beyond reckoning, their nature is one. Not one of these facts of anatomy tells against the hypothesis of the evolution of man from some lower form. With that hypothesis every one of them is isj harmony. Chapter HI.—PHYSIOLOGY We turn now to the consideration of the functions of man and of other animals. In the study of these we shall again find reason to believe that there is nothing in common between man and god (as to whose physiology we are lamentably ignorant), and that there is everything in common between man and the lower animals. I may begin with a very broad assertion; but it is as incon­ trovertible as it is sweeping. Not one of the functions of the �16 TIIE ORIGIN OF MAN. human body is performed by man in any other way than it is performed by other members of the animal kingdom. From the first moment of the life of the human being, through all the stages of development up to the adult condition, in every detail of that adult life, the higher Primates, from the gibbon up to man, are one as to their general and special physiology. With one part of the subject—viz., the physiology of the nervous system—the next chapter deals in detail. In this chapter my task is akin to that attempted in its predecessor. Out of the many thousands of facts that go to establish the identity of man’s physiological nature with that of the anthropoid apes, I shall choose a few of those most striking and most easily comprehended by the student who is not necessarily a physiologist. The facts to be given will be grouped under the following heads. The sexes, parasites, wounds, diseases, drugs, periodicity, development. It will at once be seen that I am not taking up the various functions in the order in which they are considered in the ordinary books xm physiology. The uniformity of the processes of digestion, of absorption, of circulation, of respiration, of secretion, and so forth in all the Primates, noticeable as it is, may not detain us. That monkeys, apes, men, feed, take up the digested footf into their blood, circulate that blood, purify it by breathing, and by the secretions of different organs all in exactly the same fashion is a familiar fact. Let us turn to other facts not quite so familiar and equally significant. 1. The. sexes.—Two points call for notice here. In the pre­ ceding chapter it was laid down that the structure of the organs concerned in the reproduction of the individual and in the perpetuation of the species were the same in man and his allies. It is now needful to mention that whilst this is the case those differences of structure that obtain between the male and the female of the human race are paralleled by, or better, are identical with the difference between the male and female in the anthropoid apes. At regularly recurring lunar periods the female of the anthropoid apes is subject to the same physiological pheenomena as the human. All the symptoms and concomitants are, with slight differences in detail, of the same essential nature. Again, the whole of the process of reproduction in all its many details is in. no essential different in man and his neighbors. Every act, from the commencement of courtship �xxlE uRIGiN OF MAK. , z 17 to the end of the nurturing of the young that we see in the lower races of mankind, and every detail of it have been observed in the study of the sex relations of man’s allies. (2) Parasites.—Most animals are infested by other animals. The bodies of most members of the animal kingdom within and without are the happy hunting ground for one or more lower kinds of animal. It is found that man has no monopoly of parasitism. Not one of the creatures that is apt to infest him is peculiar to him. Everyone of them is found in or upon other animals. It is not only that these parasitic animals are of the same class or order. They are of the same genus, and in many cases of the same species. Thus the skin disease known as scabies, or less euphemistically “ itch,” is due to a little animal, a member of the same class; the Arachnida, to which the spider and scorpion belong. The generic name of this creature is acarus. Its specific name is scabiei, and exactly the same name must be and is given to the animal that causes scabies in the anthropoid apes, for it is identical with that which infests man. Nor is this similarity of parasitism confined to those para­ sites that belong to the animal kingdom. Many of the organisms that affect man are of a vegetable nature—i.e., if we admit the vegetable character of the group Fungi. This group comprises among others yeast, the mould that occurs on old leather and in wine-cellars, the puff-balls, and the mushrooms. The food of - its members generally is organic matter that is passing into the condition of inorganic. Hence their name of saprophytes. <ra7rpos (sapros) = putrid, ^>vrov (phuton) = plant. Some of them find their food of this transition kind in other living ^organisms, and then habitat is within or upon those organisms. Thus some of tht skin diseases of animals are due to the growth within the tissues of the skin of Fungi. Ringworm, that affects the skin of the scalp, is due to the growth of the mycelium of a fungus in the skin. The mycelium is the mass of threads that develop within the decaying matter on which the fungus feeds. fivKos (mukos) = fungus. Now this disease is, as people know only too well, readily transferable from one human being to another. But this disease is also found to be with equal readiness transferable from man to the anthropoid apes. The fungus whose ring of mycelium growing in the skin gives rise to the appearance whence the disorder take* n �8 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. its name, finds an equally favorable nidus or nest for growth and development in the scalp of man and in the scalp of his allies. As an instance of the general community of the animal nature, of how far down in the animal kingdom our kinship reaches, the following well authenticated case may serve. Certain mice in a house were observed to be affected with favus, a skin disease whose effects appear as yellow patches. Favus = honeycomb. A cat, by whom some of these favus-suffering mice were eaten, became affected with the same complaint. Here, we may take it, the transmission from the one to the other was from within, as it were. But a little later on the children of the family with whom the cat was in the habit of playing had favus patches appearing on their skin, and in this case the transmission must have been from the exterior of one animal’s body to the exterior of that of the others. These facts, and innumerable others of the same kind, bear witness to a remarkable oneness of nature between the integument and the interior of man and of animals less com­ plex than man. Identically the same parasites could not infest different animals, and be so easily communicable from one animal to the others, were there not much that is common, if not actually identical in the nature of these animals. (3) Wounds.—The whole of the question of the regenera­ tion of destroyed, or recuperation of impaired tissues is of deep interest in this comparison of man with lower forms. The lower the animal, and the lower the tissue, the greater is the amount of restoration possible. Thus injury to an animal that belongs to one of the less highly-developed classes of the animal kingdom is, even if it be very extensive, likely to be completely atoned for by the reparative power of the animal. But the removal of any considerable portion of a more highly-developed animal is not likely to be followed by restoration of the part removed. In like manner, if even in man some lowly form of tissue, such as the fibrous or cartilaginous, is in part destroyed, it can be again made good. But if the tissue is a complex and excessively active one, as the muscular or nervous, there is little likelihood of its reparation. There is then a close connexion between the lowness and simplicity of the organism or the part injured and the �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 19 I power of restoration. One or two special cases taken from the inferior members of the animal kingdom (I always use the rather unfortunate word “ inferior ” in the sense of simpler) may serve to make this general proposition more clear. In the great sub-kingdom of the ringed animalB all the members have this power of restoration to a greater or less I degree. Even the highest member, the lobster, of the highest class, the Crustacea, is able to reform its very large forceps­ bearing limb with greater or less completeness if it is removed. In the Insecta. a class that is perhaps, on the I whole, less complex than the Crustacea, the power of repara­ tion is something more marked. But within the limits of I this class itself, the general principle comes out. For there r are three stages in the life of the insect, the larva or cater­ pillar, pupa or chrysalis, the imago or perfect insect, and it is . in the larval or. simplest stage that the power of restoration is at its best. Parallel to this is the case of the Myriapoda, /xvptos (murios) = many, wovs (pous) = a foot, a class including the centipede I- and the millipede. In the members of this class the restorative ■ power, always greater than in the more complex insects, is much more noticeable up to the last moult of the skin than after that moult has taken place, and the final fixed condition of the animal has been attained. Similar phenomena are met with in the study of the highest sub-kingdom, that of the Vertebrata. In the lowest class, the Pisces, the power of reparation is most marked. The whole of the fin or limb of certain fishes has been restored after accidental removal. In the class above the Pisces, that of the Amphibia., to which the frog, the newt, the salamander belong, this capacity for reforming parts that have been taken ' away, is still well marked. Thus a salamander had its tail removed eight times in succession, and restored as many times. The same experiment with the leg of this amphibian was ; attended with similar results. The frog is clearly higher in r the scale of being than the salamander. In the frog the i reparative power is not nearly so evident. But in the tadpole, > or lower condition of the frog, the power is possessed as > completely as by the salamander, or even as by the fish. And this is in keeping with the fact that the tadpole is really a » fish, whilst the adult frog is really a reptile. The power | �20 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. restoration of parts that the tadpole has, is almost wanting in the adult frog. Finally we turn to man. It is well known that after operations the stumps occasionally give indications of partial regeneration. Rudimentary outgrowths are formed on them that take at times the appearance of very abortive digits. The case of supernumary fingers or toes is of the same kind. When an extra digit appears on the hand or on the foot of a human being, when a child is born with six fingers or six toes, removal of the extra digit is often followed by its reformation. This tendency to have extra fingers or toes is hereditary. It runs in families, as the phrase goes. To illustrate at once this fact, and the restorative power resident in the supernumerary digits, I take the cases quoted by Charles Darwin in his “ Descent of Man.” Four members of one family are recorded as having an extra finger on each hand and an extra toe on each foot. In another case one man had an extra toe. This was removed while its owner was a child. It had again to be removed at the age of 33. This man had a family of fourteen children. Three of them presented the paternal peculiarity. In one case the extra digit was removed three times. The most interesting point about these cases is in that which I may call the double reversion. The increase in the number of digits is a case of reversion, for it is a generalisa­ tion in biology that repetition of similar parts implies lowness of organisation. In the plants and in the animals alike, if a series of similar parts occurs, as the uniform succession of cells in an Alga, or the uniform succession of rings in the body of a centipede or of an earthworm, the plant or animal is sure to be of a simpler nature than a living thing, such as a rose-tree or a vertebrate, in which a number of differentiated parts are combined into the one organism. Or, to look at the generalisation in another way yet more germane to the cases we are studying; in the lower Vertebrata the number of digits in the limbs is greater, as a rule, than in the higher. The digits that enter into the fin of a fish are very many. Those that enter into the arm or leg of a mammal are much fewer in number. When, therefore, an increase in number of the fingers or of the toes takes place in man, we have a case of reversion. For a repetition of similar parts implies lowness of organisation. �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 21 But the abnormal part, as we have seen, has the restorative power much better developed than the normal parts. In this also is a reversion. For the lower the animal and the lower the tissue, the greater its capacity for reparation. Why I said that in these instances of the appearance and reappear­ ance of extra digits we. have cases of double reversion will now be understood. There is reversion in the increase of number of parts. There is reversion in the fact that the abnormal part has the power of reparation much more marked than it is in the normal. The cases known to every obstetric physician of intra- . uterine amputation and restoration of the limbs thus ampu­ tated have a very direct bearing on this discussion. Certain membranous growths are sometimes formed within the uterus that may literally cut off a limb of the foetus. The human embryo has at this early stage the power of restoring with greater or less completeness the organ thus removed, and at birth a leg or arm is found to have grown again in place of the one that had been amputated. 3. Diseases.—Just as man has no parasites that are special to himself, so he has no diseases that are not to be met with in other members of the animal kingdom. From the time of Boccaccio men have known that diseases - are not only common to man and his fellows in the animal king­ dom, but are communicable from him to them, or from them to him. The Italian novelist narrates the throwing of the clothes of a person just dead from the plague into the street, and how two hogs that laid down to rest on them rose plaguestricken. Pericarditis, inflammation of the pericardium or serous membrane that surrounds the heart, occurs in birds. Goitre or Derbyshire neck, the enlargement of one of the vascular or ductless glands (the thyroid of the throat) affects' mules, horses, goats, pigs, sheep, oxen. Many of the diseases of domestic animals are identical with diseases in the human species that are known by other names. Thus the cattle plague or rinderpest, that causes so much trouble to all European nations, is the typhus of man, and what is known as malignant pustule in the latter is joint­ murrain in oxen and sheep. All the so-called zymotic diseases are common to the Mam­ malia generally. They are named zymotic because they are �22 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. supposed to be due to a ferment, £vp/r) (zume) = ferment, that is their concomitant, whether cause or effect is in most cases not yet known. These various diseases are, therefore, attended by the appearance of certain bodies within the blood of the animal affected. Identity of disease in different animals, and the possibility of the transmission of one of these zymotic diseases from one animal to another, argue a great physical similarity, if not a physiological identity, in the blood of these animals. Glanders in the horse may, v ider certain circumstances, be communicated to man. Small-pox attacks other Mammalia as well as the human race. The epidemic of this disease in England, in 1862, attacked sheepflocks throughout the country. The history of its origin and transmission from farm to farm was as definite as the history of it in regard to men and women. The disease broke out first at the farm of Joseph Parry, at Allington, in Wiltshire. Cholera, again, is not only a human disease. Cats and dogs suffer from it, and, as it would appear, they may catch it as the result of cutaneous exhalations. Lower animals than ths Mammalia are also affected. In 1846, when cholera attacked the British soldiers at Kurrachee, in India, the birds of prey fled from the infected district, and the fish were cast up in shoals on the sea-shore, dead. Yellow fever and typhoid are no exceptions to this general rule. The epidemic air has its effect on man and the lower animals alike. Diseases are transmitted from lower animals to man, and then from man to man. An ape may give typhoid fever to his keeper, and' his keeper may give it to other men. And it is to be observed ■“hat this transference of any form of disease from man to some other animal, or vice versd, is attended with exactly those slight modifications in symptoms and in the course of the malady that we should expect when it affected species allied, but not identical. Naturalists who have had opportunity of studying thehabits of anthropoid apes in their native countries, and under the normal conditions of their life, are among the best wit­ nesses in this controversy as to the origin of man. Their testimony is unanimous. Whether it be Brehm, who observes the Primates of Paraguay, or Bengger, who observes the primates of Africa, or anyone of the men, less able or less fortunate than these two indefatigable Germans, who follow m their footsteps, the evidence i; m all eases the same. Thus �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 23 the statements of Brehm as to the Cebus Azarse of Paraguay are corroborated in regard to other monkeys and apes both of the Old and of the New World. The young suffer from fever when they are cutting their milk teeth. At that time they are a source of both trouble and anxiety to their parents. All the diseases of the digestive organs to which human flesh is heir attack the Simian alimentary canal—from the slight pang of indigestion up to a severe inflammation of the bowels or a gastric fever. The eye, identical in its structure and in its functions in man and in his allies, is in him and them subject to the same infirmities. Apes and monkeys are known tc suffer from cataract or opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye. The respiratory organs tell the same tale. Slight colds, coughs, a genuine catarrh, inflammation of the lungs, and even phthisis or consumption, with all its attendant train of symptoms—hectic flush, high temperature, and the rest—all these have been noticed again and again in the zoological kinsmen of man. The diseases that have to do with the nervous system or even with that most complex organ of that system, the brain, are no exception to the general rule. Apoplexy is a not infre­ quent cause of death among the Primates generally. Every phase of mental weakness, from mere inferior capacity up to the wildest forms of madness, are known not only in monkeys and apes, but far down through the animal kingdom. Indeed the uniformity of mental disorders throughout this great kingdom is strong evidence in favor of the oneness of the nervous system of animals in all essentials, and of the truth that the highest mind is but the result of evolution from the lower and the lowest. Vice in horses is nothing other than incipient madness, a more or less marked form of lunacy. An extreme case of the same kind of mental disorder, only differing, therefore, from vice in the horse in degree is the “must” of the elephant. And to lead us on to the last set of illustrations as to disease that my space permits me to give, I may mention the fact that puerperal fever mania is not confined to the human female. This terrible form of brain disorder that occasionally seizes on women after child­ birth with the most disastrous effects, as a rule, is met with in the lower animals, at least as far down as certain of the Ungulata or hoofed Mammalia. The sow has been known to suffer from puerperal mania. �24 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. In fact every disease of the reproductive system is common to all the higher Primates. To name but one other, perhaps the most striking example; the fearful scourge syphilis works its disastrous will on the anthropoid apes as well as on the human species. 4. Drugs.—The uniformity in relation to the attacks of diseases Njtween man and the lower animals would lead us to expect a like t>»?rormity in relation to the effects of different drugs on the organism of man and of other members 01 the same kingdom The expectation is fulfilled. Generally it may be stated that every drug has practically the same effect on the human being and on other Mammalia. Indeed this is at once the result and the cause of most of the experiments as to the effect of drugs on animals other than man. As early investigation showed the identity of results whether he or his fellows were the subject of the experiments, later experiments have been tried on the inferior animals with a view to determining if newly-discovered remedies are of real value or not to the world of sentient things as a whole. For no one but an anti-vivisectionist holds for a single moment that these experiments are made for the benefit of the human race alone. The desire is to ascertain by carefully-conducted empirical attempts whether this or that substance is likely to be of use in the treatment of the diseases of animals generally, and likely to take its place among that list of pain-lesseners in which are written the names of opium and chloroform. Passing over the multitudinous pharmaceutical remedies, /lom simple water up to ergot of rye, that have been shown by demonstration to have the same effect on the higher animals generally, I will only consider one or two substances that are of special interest, inasmuch as their action is admittedly on the nervous system. It will be evident that I select these because the last straw to which the opponents of Evolution cling, drowning in the sea of knowledge, is the strange fiction that man differs as to his nervous system from his allies. Tea and coffee and tobacco have the same effect on the anthropoid apes as on man himself. Tea contains a certain vegetable alkaloid called theine, coffee a certain vegetable alkaloid called caffeine. An alkaloid is a complex organic substance, made up generally of four chemical elements, tarbon. hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, usually combined to­ �THE OR 1(4 IN OF MAN. 25 gether in large numbers of atoms. It is called an alkaloid because of its similarity to the alkalis, potash, soda, ammonia. The active principles of the plants, those bodies which give to the plants their value to man as medicines, e.g., are the alkaloids. One of the most interesting points for us at present is that theine, the alkaloid of tea, and caffeine the alkaloid of coffee have been shown by chemical analysis to be identical in chemical composition and in properties. It is a very significant fact that the principle of the tea of China, the coffee of Arabia, the mate or Paraguay tea of America are one and the same. Its chemical formula, by whatsoever name you may choose to call it, is C8 H10 N4 O2—i.e., the alkaloid of these three plants consists of eight atoms of carbon, ten of hydrogen, four of nitrogen, two of oxygen. It would seem from the generality of the habit of tea or of coffee-drinking that some want is supplied to the race of man by this principle. But this want is not the prerogative of man, for his neighbors are found to enjoy the non-alcoholic stimulants even as he enjoys them, and the effect produced on him by the drinking of tea or of coffee is repeated in the anthropoid apes when they take these beverages. Tobacco has an alkaloid called nicotine. Its formula is C10 H14 N2. It contains no oxygen. The properties of this alkaloid are familiar to every schoolboy. Its effect on the higher Primates is uniform. Apes at first suffer from the use of tobacco. They are nauseated by it. But, like man, they frill in many cases persevere in its employment, and very rapidly appear to derive the same sedative comfort from smoking that is one of the happiest possessions of the human race. The drug alcohol will furnish us with a concluding illus­ tration. This is of greater importance than any other, because its action is so clearly on the nervous system, and on the higher centres of that system. The effect of alcohol on apes and monkeys, and, in fact, on the Mammalia generally, is the same as on man. And, if I may use the phrase, it is the same in its very diversity. By this I mean that, whilst the total effect of this drug is intoxication, whether it be man or another form of animal that is affected, the manner of the intoxication differs considerably in the different individuals. It is a familiar fact that this holds also with respect to man. Thus, whilst the negroes of the north-east of Africa patch �86 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. baboons Dy setting out vessels containing beer and thus making the baboons drunk and incapable, yet experiments of Rengger in the same part of the world establish the fact that there is a “diversity of gifts ” (I use the word in the English, not the German, sense) in the apes under the influence of alcohol. Some are rendered excessively morose, and want to fight everyone they come across. Others are reduced to a maudlin state, and weep on or without the least provocation. A few are “ real good fellows,” and with them the result of a stimulant is a diffusive bonhomie. These are the sort of apes that would ask everybody to dinner. Variable as are the individual effects, the next morning (that terrible next morning!) exhibits its human sameness. They sit melancholy, with their heads on their hands, and refuse everything but soda-water. This is the account of Rengger. But the present writer is distantly acquainted with an anthropoid ape, the property of a musichall exhibitor, who has “ evolved " further than his African compeers. He is said to get intoxicated (with his proprietor) every night, after the performance, and in the morning to enjoy a brandy and soda as well as a club man. All this is very laughable and very tearful. But, half amusing, half painful as it is, the facts just given show very conclusively that the drug alcohol has similar effects, in their very dissimilarity, on the brains of man and of anthro­ poid apes, and show that the kinship in brain-nature goes low down into the animal kingdom. I may mention that a member of the lowest mammalian order but one, the Marsupialia, has been known to take rum and tobacco like a Christian. This order is confined naturally to Australia, and comprises such pouched animals (marsupium = a pouch) as the kangaroo, the oppossum, wombat. The creature of which I am speaking is an inhabitant of Queensland. Its technical name is Phascolarctus cinereus. 5. Periodicity.—Few phsenomena are more mysterious than those connected with periodicity. It is a familiar fact to all men that certain functions, normal or abnormal, of the human body are, either in their recurrence or their duration, or their times of intensity, related to the periods of the moon. The relation of the reproductive function to lunar periods is well known. One form of that relation is the exceedingly definite gestation time in the human animal. To as in our pre­ �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 27 sent investigation as to whether man is a special creation in the image of god, or is the result of development from lower animal forms, the most important fact is that this lunar periodicity is not confined to man. It is a general phaenomenon throughout the animal kingdom. For such of ths proofs of this momentous question as I am now able to give, I am indebted to a remarkable paper by Mr. Laycock, contributed to the British Association as long ago as the yeai 1842. The paper contains a resume of a very large number oi observations made by Mr. Laycock on a very large numbei of animals. His conclusion is that a law of seven days periodicity is very general in the animal kingdom. It affects many members of that kingdom in regard to gestation metamorphosis (as in insects), acute diseases, such as fevers, and chronic disorders. I give one or two of his results. The tima that elapses in the case of the glow-worm, from the impregna­ tion to the hatching of the eggs, is-exactly six weeks. Of the class Pisces (fishes) the gestation time is twenty weeks. As to the class Aves, or birds, the period of gestation in the flycatcher species is two weeks; in the members of the order Grallidae three weeks ; in the duck four weeks; in the swan six weeks precisely. These are but a few chosen from Mr. Laycock’s illustrations. The result of observation on this point in 129 different species of Aves and Mammalia was that in sixty-seven cases the number of days between impregnation and birth was an exact multiple of seven, i.e, of one thirty-sixth of the human period. In twenty-four cases this was the fact within one day, and in every one of the other thirty-eight cases there was some uncertainty in the conduct of the observation and experiment that made the results of no value one way or the other. This should be taken in conjunction with the fact that intermittent diseases attack the lower animals according to the same law of periodicity that holds in man. The dog suffers from tertian ague. Further, every physician knows that there are critical days, and what I may call sub-critical days, in acute diseases. On the critical days there is an intensity of the attack more marked than at any other time, and on the sub-critical there is also an attack, not so excessive as on the critical days. Now, these critical days are �28 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. the 7th, 14th arid 21st, and the sub-critical are the 4th and 11th, midway between the critical. The fact that this remarkable, and hitherto inexplicable law connecting certain functions, normaT or abnormal, in man with lunar periods holds also in so many of the lower animals, seems to the evolutionist strong indirect evidence of the com­ munity of man’s origin with that of the lower animals. 6. Development.—The las' set of facts that I give under the head of general physiology i.e,, the study of the functions of the body other than those oj the nervous system, are facts of embryology. To my mind, these are the most con­ vincing evidence in favor of the teaching of Evolution. Speaking broadly, man in his development goes through a series of transition stages that are identical with the persistent conditions of the lower animals. In his development from the egg or ovum, up to the state in which he is unmistakably a human being, he 'presents anatomical and physiological phenomena that are precisely those to be seen in lower animals than man in their adult state. On the theory of special creation, the whole of this wonder­ ful series of changes is without meaning. It is worse than meaningless. It is misleading. If it be true that man is the image of god, we are compelled to believe that god has gone through these stages of development. On the antagonistic theory the whole of the embryonic changes in the human being are quite intelligible. They correspond with the stages of man’s evolution in the practically infinite past. They lead us up to the beautiful generalisation that man’s ontogeny is an epitome of his phylogeny; that the history of the individual is a picture in little of the history of the race a>v, ovtos (on, ontos) = a being, yevvaM (gennao) = I grow Phylum = a stem. According to the teaching of Evolution, every human being in a few years traverses the same ground as that traversed by his ancestors in the course of millions of millions of ages, and this is so in keeping with general truths that the idea seems a priori likely. For in our knowledge of things to-day the same principle obtains. The child who learns a language, or the man who acquires a knowledge of some advanced science, gains in a few days possession of the heritage of ages. The result of the laborious efforts, the trials, the successes, the failures of generations of men and women is ours to-day within the space of one or two heart-beats. �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 29 It is impossible to give all, or many, of the details in support of this general proposition, that the man in his development passes through stages representative of the complete conditions of lower animals, that are probably identical with certain of his ancestral forms. The full, or even the partial comprehension of these details is only within the power of the practical student of embryology. But once again a few facts comprehensible by the nonscientific reader may be given. The human being is, at the commencement, an ovum or egg. That ovum is l-125th of an inch in diameter. It is a single cell, with wall, with protoplasmic contents, with a nucleus or endoplast (the germinal vesicle) with a nucleolus, or little nucleus (the germinal spot). This first appearance on the stage of being is, in all respects, identical with the single cell that constitutes the whole of the lowest animals, and makes the whole of the lowest plants. It is to-day a scientific truism to say that no one could distinguish this cell that is to become a human being or not to become a human being, according as impregnation takes places or does not take place, from one of the microscopic organisms that hover on the border line, not only between the plant and animal kingdom, but between the kingdoms of the living and the non-living. This single cell after impregnation divides into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two and so forth, until a mass of similar cells is formed. This stage of the human animal is called the morula stage. Morus = a mulberry, and the appearance of the collection of many cells is not unlike that of a mul­ berry fruit. Just such an appearance is presented by certain low forms both of animals and of plants. A little later the inner cells have liquefied, and the outer condensed into two membranes, and now our embryo is a double bag, holding the liquid contents, as are some of the Coelenterata, members of the sub-kingdom that contains the hydra (the fresh-water polyp) and the sea anemone. Passing, of necessity, over a very large number of suc­ cessive stages of development, let me only mention some half a dozen other casual points that bear on the contention of the evolutionist. How does the backbone of man make its first appearance ? As a little rod of indifferent tissue running along the middle line of what is to be the back, and �30 THE OBIGIN OF MAN. marking where the bodies of the vertebrae will in good tima be fashioned and placed. Now, in the Mediterranean sea, we find to-day Amphioxus, or the lowest of the Vertebrata, and in th e middle line of the dorsal region of this rudimentary fish dissection reveals a line of indifferent tissue the notochord. rwTos (notos) = back. The Amphioxus is dying out rapidly. A century hence, possibly no such animal will exist. But a century hence the conclusive evidence yielded by this lowest vertebrate or highest invertebrate will not be needed. Every one will have accepted Evolution by that time. The tail turns up again here. Early in the development of the skeleton of man the os coccygis (or tail) is relatively much larger than in the adult state. It extends at first con­ siderably beyond the legs. And as to the legs and arms, the limbs generally, it should be noted that they in their incipient development, and in their first stages of development are exactly as they are in other Vertebrata—that in fact, the arms and legs of man begin to develop, and continue for some time to develop on the same plan as the fins of fish. One special fact may be noted in connexion with the develop­ ment of the limbs. The great toe is a stumbling block to many who are studying Evolution. This and the thumb are n man supposed to be so essentially different, in their arrangement with regard to the other digits as to make out man as a distinct creation. To what extremities are^the opponents of this great theory driven! Now, in the veiy young embryo, long before birth, the great toe is much shorter than the rest of the digits, and instead of being parallel with the axis of the foot, is, as in so many of the Primates, at an angle with that axis. The alimentary canal of man is in the zoology books usually distinguished from that of Aves, Reptilia, Amphibia, and Pisces on this ground. In man, and in the Mammalia generally, the alimentary canal is quite shut off (in the normal adult stage) from the renal and from the reproductive system. In the lower Vertebrata, on the other hand, the ducts from th> kidneys, and in most cases the ducts that cany off the eggs in the female, or the impregnating secretion in the male, open into the lower or posterior end of the ilimentary canal. Then that terminal portion of the intestine is known as a cloaca. Cloaca = a sewer. But there is a stage in the development of the human embryo when such �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 31 a cloaca exists, and the digestive system is not shut off from the renal or from the reproductive. The kidney, or renal organ itself, is another illustration of the general thesis. Without going into anatomical detail, I may state that in the group Amphibia, and in other Verte­ brata lower than the highest class, Mammalia, the structure of the kidneys is essentially different from that which is presented in the Mammalia. These more lowly-organised kidneys are called corpora Wolffiana. In the development of the Mam­ malia the first kidneys that appear are corpora Wolffiana, and these are replaced later on by structures of a more complex order. The transitory7 appearance of these bodies, and their replacement by their successors, are, I think, only under­ standable on the theory of Evolution. With every other set of organs the same idea obtains. Thus the heart of the human being is at first only a pul­ sating undivided vessel. So is that of Amphioxus. From the heart of adult man passes off the great aorta, the vessel that carries the good blood for distribution to the body generally. In man this large artery makes a curve to the left-hand side of the body ere it reaches the inner aspect of the vertebral column, and runs down the front face of that column as the descending aorta. In the Mammalia generally this arrange­ ment holds. In the Aves the curve is to the right, not to the left. In the Reptilia there are two aortic arches, one over-running to the right, the other to the left, that join together on the anterior aspect of the backbone. In the Amphibia the same plan as under the Reptilia obtains in the adult condition. But in the larval state (the tadpole, e.g., of the frog) there are six aortic arches, three pairs, three to the right, three to the left, and this which is the state of affairs in the larva of the Amphibia is the persistent condition in the adult members of the lowest vertebrate class, the Pisces. Now in the development of man there are at first six aortic arches arranged just as in fishes. By a series of changes we have at last only the one on the left-hand side. But as surely as we reason that the arrangement of the aortic arches in the adult Amphibian is the result of evolution from the fish-like -tadpole form, so we may reason that the present arrangement of the one aortic arch in man is the result of development from pre-existing conditions identical with those now persis­ tent in fish. • If this be not the truth are we not entitled to �32 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. cry out to the holders of the antique belief, “ To what pur­ pose is this waste ? Why are there to begin with six pairs of arches when only one is ultimately to remain ? The helpless condition of the human embryo at birth, and its remarkable difference from the adult, are exactly paralleled by the condition of the anthropoid apes. The Orang-outang, e.g., does not attain its adult state until between the age of ten and fifteen, an age strictly comparable with that at which the human being in tropical latitudes ceases to be a child, Chapter IV.—MIND AND MORALS. We have considered some of the points in the anatomy and general physiology of man on which, with their innumerable fellows, are based the conclusion of the evolutionist. For this last chapter on the Origin of Man is reserved the con­ sideration of one special branch of animal physiology—that which is usually known as mental philosophy. At the beginning let me once more enter my protest against our artificial divisions. Physiology is the study of the func­ tions of the body, and, therefore, to my mind, includes the study of that function of the nervous system that many call “ mind.” Morals again are but a division of the study of mind. The moral nature of an animal is that part of its mental functions that is not self-regarding, but has to do wifi, other sentient beings. Since then, mind is but one of the functions of the body, and the moral nature is but a branch of mind, to separate the study of these from physiology gene­ rally is to make a distinction without a difference. The truth is that we are not yet free from the superstition that man is threefold, like a kind of miniature Trinity. Man’s physical, mental and moral nature, man’s body, mind and soul, have been so long regarded as really distinct states of phsenomena that in a popular work it is convenient to follow the old divisions. As, therefore, so much stress is laid on this branch of inquiry, having entered the necessary protest, I may now pass to the consideration of the evidence as to the origin of man that would be placed under the heading that is the title of this chapter. Mind is a function of the nervous system. It is usual to �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 33 divide mind into three parts ; a division as unreal, but as convenient as most of our methods of classification. Feeling, intellect, volition are the three customary branches. Feeling includes the various forms of sensation associated with the ordinary sense-organs of touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight; includes also a number of what are called organic sensations that are not necessarily associated with aye of the sense-organs, such as those of hunger, thirst, nausea; in­ cludes all the emotions, such as pride, anger, love, hope. Intellect is the outcome of feeling. None of the intel­ lectual functions is possible without as predecessor certain sensations. An old-fashioned classification of the intellectual functions may even to-day be used without much detriment. Judgment, abstraction, memory, reason, imagination, accord­ ing to this system, are the branches of intellect. More philo­ sophical, but less easy of compreh nision, is the three-fold division of intellect into (1) perception of similarity, when a given phsenomenon is recognised as of the same nature as some previously observed phsenomenon; (2) perception cf difference, when a given plisenomenon is recognised as of a nature other than that of some previously observed phsenomenon ; (3j memory. Volition or will is again the outcome of sensation, and at least that branch of intellect which we name as memory. Nor can we with profit enter upon the discussion before us without noticing three kinds of movement that take place in the human body, inasmuch as they have a distinct relation to the mental functions. Movements are either reflex, auto­ matic or voluntary. A reflex movement is one not attended by consciousness or volition. An instance of this kind of action is the peristaltic movement of the intestine that is going on within every living person, and is -altogether without the range of that person’s consciousness or will. An auto­ matic movement—or better, a sensori-motor movement—is not attended by will, but is attended by sensation. The con­ traction of the circular fibres of the iris, or colored part of the eye, when a light that falls on the eyes is too strong, is an example. A voluntary act is one attended both by conscious­ ness and will. The majority of the acts best known to the ordinary person, such as the writing or the reading of these words, are of this order. Of course these three branches of action graduate into earh �34 THE ORIGIN OF MAN other, as indeed the three divisions of mind mentioned above graduate into each other. Anyone who will observe with care the stages of the swallowing of a morsel of food will see a case of this gradation. The first stage, in which the food is passed to the back of the mouth, is a voluntary stage. The third, in which the food is carried from the top of the gullet into the stomach, is a reflex-action stage. But between these two is a brief, but clearly-marked, stage, of which we are conscious but over which we have no control. It is a stage of automatic, conscious, but involuntary action. So much for preliminaries. As we turn to the considera)ion of details, the first thing that meets us is what I am obliged to call the unnecessary despair of Charles Darwin. Take this phrase from his “Descent of Man,” p. 66: “In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated. These are problems for the distant future if they are ever to be solved by man.” The inquiry is far from hopeless, I venture to think. The problems of the origin of life and of the origin of mind seem to-day aS likely to be solved as the problem of the origin of man seemed to be, say at the beginning of this century. Leslie Stephen speaks for the younger school, whose more hopeful utterances are the result of the teaching of Darwin, himself so hopeless on this point. He, speaking of the dis­ tinction that our ignorance has drawn between the mental powers of man and of the lower animals, writes thus : “ The distinctions, indeed, which have been drawn seem to us to rest upon no better foundation than a great many other meta­ physical distinctions—that is, the assumption that because you can give two things different names—they must therefore have different natures. It is difficult to understand how any­ body who has ever kepi a dog or seen an elephant can have any doubts as to the animal’s power of performing the essential processes of reasoning.” Haeckel, as usual, is more outspoken than anyone else. He puts it distinctly, that the human mind differs only in degree, and not in kind, from the mind of other animals, and that in many individuals of the highest races of man the mental capacity is inferior to that of certain individuals of lower races. In®comparing the minds and morals of man with the �THE ORIGIN Ofc’ MAN. 85 minds and morals of the lower animals two methods present themselves, by the use of one or the other, or by the use of both of which we can establish the great generalisation that there is no function of the human mind that is not met with in the lower animals. Either the particular function is not met with in certain beings that are, by common consent, men, or it is met with in other beings that are, by common consent, not men. No boldness is necessary to challenge any one to name a single mental function that is special to the human race. All that is necessary is a slight knowledge of the subject. In this part of our study, more than in any other, is it necessary to guard against the common blunder of thinking only of the highest men. The comparison must be made between the lowest men and the most intelligent of the lower animals ; we must bear in mind the numberless gradations between the mental and moral nature of a Darwin and of a criminal; we must bear in mind the similar series of grada­ tions met with in the minds and morals of animals other than man; we must not forget either our savage individuals or our savage races, or the ape-men (microcephali) or the stages through which the foetus and the child pass as man’s mental nature evolves. And here also the law of the relation between ontogeny and phylogeny comes out. If the development of the individual (ontogeny) is an epitome of the development of the race (phylogeny), the study of the relatively rapid development of the child-mind reveals to us the line along which the far more slow development of the raep-mind has taken place. Every function of the human mind is met with in the minds of the lower animals. The basis of all mental functions is feeling. The fundamental perceptions here are of pleasure and pain. We may safely assume that no one will deny to animals very far down in the scale the power of perceiving pleasure and pain. Terror, an extreme form of emotional pain, has the same effects on the lower animals as on man. The contraction of some muscles, the relaxation of others, the erection of the hair, the bursting out of perspiration, the change in the character of the secretions, all are identical in man and in other Mammalia. In the Royal Academy, a few years back, there was a remarkable picture, greatly noticed by the critics. Thi �36 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. subject a mounted knight about to enter a glen that is clearly enchanted. His horse and his hounds have caught the in­ fection of the supernatural. Their faces, their bodies, their limbs, are all stricken with terror. Nothing in the picture was finer, nothing in it so fine, as the suggestion that the poses and the muscular contortions of the lower animals were but the development of the arrested tendency of the rider and master to show his terror. Yet in the picture of every living being in the painting there was further the suggestion that one word from the man, and horse and hounds alike would be themselves again, and for terror, courage would be to the fore. “ Bad temper ” is as character­ istic of certain individuals among the lower animals as of certain human individuals, and this ill condition of mind, with its attendant train of ill deeds, is, as in us, generally due to ill-treatment. The baboon that showed its temper by throwing mud on the clothes of an officer had been insulted by its 0victim firet, and showed a thoughtful appreciation of all the circumstances when it chose as the day of its mud attack, a Sunday, and the hour, the time when fashionable crowds were by, Deceitfulness is a mental phaenomenon, not by any means confined to man. We may place on one side the cases in which the beetles, crabs, snakes, turkeys, opposums, elephants, foxes, polecats, jackals, rats, figure death. Whether this figuring is voluntary, or the r6sult of a cataplectic state is still a moot point. But in class after class, even of animals not near to man in organisation or in mind-powers, deliberate and purposeful deception is practised, involving a high condition of mental evolution. The trap-door spider of New Zealand plans out and makes nests of the most deceptive nature. One trap-door spider, e.g., made its nest in a piece of ground in which holes had been made by rain drops, and in such a fashion that the nest was not distinguishable from one of the rain-drop holes. In this member of the class Arachnids of the sub-kingdom Annulosa that highest form of art, ars celare artem, is to be seen, for very often the arrangement that it makes of earth or vegetable matter is “ apparently careless.” the • sticklebat among fishes diverts the attention of dangerous foes by pretending to pursue an imaginary prey, vid thus lures its foe from the neighborhood of the nest �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 37 of the sticklebat. Many small birds in England, as the chaffinch, and larger ones in England, or other countries, as oiu own partridge, the great rock partridge of Tibet, the ruffled grouse of North America will figure lameness in order t<j draw attention away from their young, or from their nests. The fox is proverbial for its powers of deception. In pursuit of ducks a fox will immerse himself in water all but his head, which he conceals in a bough of a tree. Thus he swims towards his prey. Less dubious attributes of mind are equally evident in our study of the animal kingdom. Excitement, boredom, wonder and curiosity are illustrations. Nor do such qualities as emu­ lation, magnanimity, require much comment. No one who has ever seen the cruel and brutal’sport of coursing, no one who has watched horses racing, can for a moment doubt. Eager as the jockeys are, in the rare event of all being fair and above board, to get the better of the start and of the finish, the horses they ride are no less eager. Anyone who has ever held a bone just out of the reach of a dog will vouch for it that the emotion of hope is present in the minds of the lower animals, whilst the same quadruped furnishes, in the behavior of large dogs to annoying little curs, the stock •example of magnanimity in the animals below man. The faculty of imitation, on which depends so much of the growth mentally of the individual, is the possession of animals lower than man, and indeed we may say that most of the actions usually spoken of as instinctive are to a large extent learned of their parents by the young animals. Hawks, t.g., are known to teach their offspring how to attack other birds, first by using dead, and then by using living specimens for the purposes-of instruction. Occasionally this imitative faculty leads to the performance of acts not habitual to the animal. Thus dogs that have been brought up by cats will wash their faces with their paws—a moBt undoglike habit. A good example not only of the possession of this power at its best amongst non-human animals, but of that variation in its nature of such importance to the theory of Natural ■Selection is shown by the monkeys that men train to act. Charles Darwin, in his “ Descent of Man,” tells the tale of the monkey trainer who was in the habit of purchasing monkeys from the authorities of the Zoological Gardens in London. The usual price he gave was five pounds for each specimen. �38 THE ORIGIN OF- MAN. But if this man were allowed to take a monkey away with him for a few days “ on approval ” he was willing to give twice as much. Questioned as to the reason, he replied that in a very short time he could tell if a monkey was likely or not likely to be of use to him. A monkey that was not attentive and persevering was of little value. If it was easily disturbed and its attention distracted by any slight motion or sound, as of a fly on the wall, or a noise without, the pupil was not likaly to be a profitable one. To give proofs of the possession of the faculty of memory in the lower animals would be absurd. But how far superior this faculty is in some of these inferiors of man to the memory possessed by man himself in certain cases, may be recalled to mind. The old Greek poets in their unconscious way knew this. On the return of Ulysses, the much-wandering, to Ithaca, the men that were once his friends do not recognise him. As he stands in his rags at the door, the suitors of Penelope within make jest and butt of him, not knowing that the only man that could draw the great bow hanging up so long dis­ used is with them again. But after the old nurse has come out and known him for Ulysses and has been hushed into silence by his warning figure on his shut lips, the dog Argus, old and blind, recognises his master, and falls dead of joy. Charles Darwin tells a sufficiently characteristic tale of his dog. It is a type of any number of the like stories that could be told by anyone who has kept dogs. The dog was a morose, uncompanionable animal, who would only take for companion his master. The master was away from home five years and two months. On his return a familiar word spoken in familiar voice to the dog was answered by no demonstration of affection or even of recognition. The animal simply rose and went out for a walk, as if it had gone through the same routine every day for five years past. Much further down in the animal kingdom we find very distinct evidences of memory. The experiments of Sir John Lubbock prove conclusively that memory exists at least as low down in the animal scale as the class Insecta. The ants that the zoologist, botanist, politician, banker has made his special study certainly have memories that extend over a period of four months. Turning to the man side of memory, in lower types of the human race, we find that among the individuals who are of �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 39 a mental organisation inferior to that of the average of thei race, and among the races who are of a mental organisatio' inferior to the average of the genus Homo, memory is ver­ deficient. Of this fact, in regard to individuals, everyone cai furnish examples from his own experience, either taken from those diseased congenitally, i.e., as the result of heredity, or from those suffering from acute or chronic nervous disorders. As to the weakness of memory in races, the testimony of travellers is again our help. In many of the savage peoples this mental function is not so well developed as in the horse or the dog. The cases of the microcephali belong to the former, rather than to the latter category. In none of them was memory well developed. In the cases that had the greatest notoriety in this country, those of the Aztecs, the boy Maximo and the girl Bartola, the proofs of deficiency of memory are familiar. These ape-human beings would remember anyone who came to them two days running, or even with the lapse of only one day between the two successive visits. But if two or more days were allowed to intervene, all remembrance of the face and form that had been seen was lost. Nowadays there is much talk about altruism. This philosophy teaches the difficult lesson that the standard of a man’s acts, words and thoughts should be the welfare of others rather than of himself, the good of the world not that of any particular individual. The sacrifice of self, and the working for others that are implied in altruism are supposed to be men’s prerogative alone. The lower animals are not regarded as possessing the social virtues by the ordinary people. How unjust all this is, the observer of the lower animals knows well. Instances of the possession of the mental, or if you will, the moral faculties implied in the word “ altruism ” are frequent, not only in individuals but in species and in orders of the lower animals, and not alone in those highest in the scale. The virtue of mutual love is not only human. In many of the non-human animals it is shown far more powerfully than in man himself. Turning to the converse side of the picture, among the Bosjesmans and Australian blacks, the father is as likely as not to murder his child as soon as it is born. Even the mother treats her child no better than a cow treats her calf, leaving it to shift for itself at a very early age.' Od �40 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. the other hand, the love and respect of children to their parents is almost, or quite, unknown in savage races. The naturalist, Wood, writing of the Bosjesmans of South Africa, and of the aborigines of Australia, says, “ I very much doubt whether they have ever possesed the least idea that any duty is owing to a parent, from a child. It is said to be the glory of a North American Indian boy at as early an age as possible to be able to despise his mother and defy his father.” The love and kindness of parents towards their young is shown among the anthropoid apes in very human fashion. Thus the Cebus Azarae of Paraguay was observed by Brehm not only to watch over its infant when asleep, but to drive away flies from the face of the sleeping child. The Hylobates, or gibbon, washes the face of its offspring. So close is the attachment between parents and young that in many cases the death of the latter was followed by that of the former. The elders could not survive the loss of their little ones. Often, as with the children of the human race, orphans are adopted by those animals that are without offspring of their own. Generally the adopted young is of the same species as the benevolent adopter. But this is not always the case. Kittens have ere now been the foster children of anthropoid, or even of cynomorphic apes, kiw, kwos (kuon, kunos) = a dog. p-optftrj (morphe) = form. A baboon, one of the dog-like apes, adopted a kitten. The little orphan one day happened to scratch the foster mother, whereupon the baboon promptly bit off the claws of the kitten. In connexion with this anecdote, an interesting instance of the nature of anti­ Darwinian criticism, and of the care of Darwin himself may be given. The Quarterly Review of July, 1871, cast doubt on the truth of the story of the kitten and baboon, inasmuch as it considered the biting off a kitten’s claws by a Primate would be impossible. Patent, indefatigable, experimenting Darwin proceeds to try the experiment himself. In his simple ' way he narrates how he made the attempt to bite off the claws of a young kitten with perfect success. Before turning to some cases that are supposed to be of special difficulty to the evolutionist, I take two other mental functions that are by common consent among the highest intellectual processes—viz., reason and imagination. Reason and instinct—what nonsense has been written and talked in thy names 1 Reason was human, instinct was not. All the �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. mental processes of man were due to reason ; all those <x other animals to instinct. Even at the present time there are many who still cling to this entirely untenable position, and many who consider that reason is very rare in the animals other than man, that it is not met with except in the higher classes. The whole question of instinct is very complex and interesting. The reader who is anxious to understand the exact position of modern thought on it is referred to the eighth chapter of Darwin’s “ Origin of Species,” to G. J. Romanes’ “Animal Intelligence,” and especially his “Mental Evolution in Animals,” and to Dr. W. L. Lindsay’s “ Mina in the Lower Animals.” As I am here concerned with showing that reason exists in the lower animals rather than with considering the nature of instinct, I quote only one or two striking. facts that, with others, establish that conclusion. These should be taken side by side with the deficiency or want of reasoning power in certain races and in certain in­ dividuals. We may go very low down into the classes of the inverte­ brate sub-kingdoms without losing sight of reason. The Arachnida, Insecta, Crustacea, and generally the ringed classes are well to do in respect to their mental faculty. The spider that I saw not so long ago at Portsmouth who had built his weo on the under side of a plank that -reached from shore to a ship, and finding that the wind swayed the web to and fro, had steadied the web by means of a small pebble slung from the end of a little rope of threads, had certainly reasoned on unusual circumstances, and arrived at a very sensible conclusion. Darwin’s anecdote showing the reasoning powers of a crab is worth remembering. A naturalist observes a crab pass into his hole. Having nothing to do, the proverbial work is found for the man, and small stones are thrown at the mouth of the hole of the crustacean. Two or three miss the actual mark, and lodge on the edge of the hole. At last one falls in and disturbs the crab. This is with much labor removed and carried away to a distance from his dwelling-place. But returning from this excursion the crab sees the other stones lying near the mouth of his hole, and threatening to fall in. He pauses, he reflects, he reasons, and carries off all the other pebbles as he had carried off the first. If we study the Vertebrata. the evidence of reasoning on �42 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. the part of animals becomes very much more strong. A few cases less familiar than the ones generally given may be quoted. My friend Captain Charles Bingham, who does not by any means hold the elephant in the same high estimation as the ordinary natural history books, tells in his paper on “ Elephants,” in the November number of the magazine Progress for the year 1883, of an elephant working under the direction of a Karen driver in a tributary to the Thoungyeen river. The task was the clearing of a block of logs that were all jammed together in a swollen stream. “ For a full halfhour did the man, who was a Karen, work the elephant back­ wards and forwards, across and across the stream, now pushing at one log and now at another, but all in vain. The block would not clear away. During the whole time I observed that the elephant worked most unwillingly, evidently himself wanting to push at logs other than those pointed out to him by his driver. After watching for awhile his fruitless en­ deavors to disentangle the mass of logs, I asked the owner of the elephant, also a Karen, who stood by me on the bank, whether the elephant was accustomed to this sort of work. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘he has worked timber for many years.’ ‘ Tell the driver,’ I said, ‘ to let the elephant push at what­ ever logs he likes.’ The man smiled, as if doubting whether any good would come of that, but gave the required directions in Karen to the elephant driver, who immediately left off guiding or directing the beast. For a few minutes the elephant'Stood cogitating, filling his trunk with water, and squirting it over his back and sides. But on being spoken to gently by his driver, he left off this recreation, and went off himself to a particular log sticking up at an angle from the mass of logs, half below, and half above the water. He pressed his tusks to it, and pushed with all his might. The log moved, slid, was loosened, and the whole block of en­ tangled logs floated down the stream.” In this case the elephant had reasoned out, or exercised a knowledge gained from long experience, and applied it with better effect than the human animal, his Karen driver. Another interesting proof of the reasoning of an elephant going to the length of solving a simple problem in physics, is furnished by the fact that an elephant, wishing to bring an object within reach, blew through its trunk a blast of air that was reflected from the wall, and impinging on the desired �THE OBIGIN OF MAN. 43 object, accomplished the animal’s purpose. The result was obtained as a consequence of the law of reflexion so well known to man, that the angles of incidence and reflexion are equal. But it was hardly to be expected that an elephant should be acquainted with this generalisation. A bear has been known to put into effect reasoning some­ thing similar to the Proboscidian in the story just given. In order to obtain a piece of wood floating on water, and out of reach, this animal set up a small current with its paw that slowly swept the desired object within range. The cases of dogs exercising reasoning powers are endless. One that is of interest, as the reasoning brings about concerted action, is the instance of the Eskimo dogs, who in the polar regions divide the pack in which they are running when the ice becomes thin, and instead of continuing in a compact mass, by diluting, as it were, the band passes safely over the thin ice. » The most striking proofs of the possession of reasoning powers are furnished, as might be expected, by the animals that are in other respects the closest to man, i.e, by the anthropoid apes. For these proofs in extenso the reader must turn to Brehm’s “Die Saugethiere von Paraguay” and to Rengger’s books on South Africa. These writers give an immense number of facts, all of such an order as the three that follow. Monkeys or apes to whom eggs had been given, by smash­ ing the egg when first presented to them, and deluging their hands with the yolk, learnt at once a lesson. On the next occasion they with great care chipped off one end of the shell and sucked the egg, and this was done without any human instruction. Tools that were given to them, handled somewhat clumsily at first, and causing injury, were ever after taken up, and handled with the utmost care, and with perfect safety. Finally, I quote from Dr. Lauder Lindsay’s “ Mind in the Lower Animals,” a passage bearing upon the general mental powers of the chimpanzee, whilst the concluding part has special reference to this animal’s reasoning powers: “ The chimpanzee shows in various ways a human like or civilised behavior. * For instance, he sometimes takes his food like a man, making use of both men’s foods and beverages, as man uses them. He helps himself to wine, drinks hot tea. �44 THE 0B1G1N OF MAN. sugaring it, pouring it into a saucer, and waiting till it cools. He has been trained also to the domestic service of man. as he has been to man’s companionship. He has been taught to attend a baker’s oven fire on board ship, to act as galley fireman, regulating the temperature.” Imagination is a mind-faculty arrogantly claimed by man as his alone, and unjustly denied to his fellows. One might ask fairly how much imaginative power is in the possession of a microcephalous idiot or even of one of our slum inhabitants, or of an average middle-class business-man. But we may certainly assume that animals have imagination. The un­ necessary fear that certain animals show in certain cir­ cumstances, as when a nervous horse shies at quite harmless objects, and even at shadows, is evidence of imagination on the part of these animals. The baying of dogs, not at the moon, as we generally think, but at a point near the horizon, is another instance of an act that appears to be due to imagination. The moonlight and the shadows have evidently an effect on the animals that can only be understood by supposing that their fancy is set in play. Moreover, dogs dream. We know that they will dream of the events of the day, and how can an animal dream without imagination ? There are however some points that have to do with mind functions and with morals also, on which doubt is felt, and even by those who are in the main evolutionists. 1. The power ofprogressive improvements used to be sup­ posed to be an exclusively human power. The Australian aborigines are incapable of mental cultiva­ tion, and the missionaries, even with the promise of rum in this world and heaven in the next, find that all attempts to civilise them are failures. The negro of East Africa, in con­ tact with civilised peoples for centuries, has made no pro­ gress. Sir Samuel Bakei* speaks of the hopelessness of improving the mental state of such “ abject animals ” as the Bari of tropical Africa. The evidence of Livingstone is to the effect that the Johanna men are an unimprovable race. Monteiro, after quoting and agreeing with a number of autho­ rities on the impossibility of bettering the mental condition of the negro, says: “I can see no hope of the negro ever attain­ ing to any considerable degree of civilisation, owing to his incapacity for spontaneously developing to a higher or more perfect condition.” �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 45 The trappers of America find that the animals they seek grow more and more wary, and that the traps by which they are caught, and the persons by whom they are slain at first, are after a time of no avail. Birds in wild regions of the earth into which the telegraph is introduced, at first fly against the wires, and “ dash themselves dead.” But ere long they learn, and the race as well as the individual learns, the lesson to avoid these sources of danger. The whole history of the dog species contradicts the insolent dictum of man. The establishment of regular training schools for the tuition of the home-flying pigeons in Belgium and in Ger­ many, at Metz, Strasburg, Coblentz, Mayence, Berlin, is further evidence of the fact of the improvability of the lower animals. 2. The use of tools.—The ancient Caribs have no tools, nor even weapons. The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and the Dokos of Abyssinia are without tools or weapons. The aborigines of Tasmania and of Australia had no tools, and their only weapon was the boomerang. The lower animals use the tools made by man, and in not a few cases make and use implements as deserving of the name of tool as are some of the first efforts of man in this direction. Non-human animals will draw carriages or guns, pile timber, fit drain-pipes, turn kitchen spits, work bellows. Thus a chimpanzee, already noticed in these pages, would lock and unlock a door or drawer, thread a needle, use knife, fork, spoon and cup, and even a napkin as decorously as a human being. It is important to notice that in this par­ ticular case, the usage of civilised implements was not com­ pulsory. The animal actually preferred employing them to eating and drinking in the usual ape fashion. Animals lower than man, even in the wild state, will break off branches of trees from which they may or may not remove the leaves and use them as walking-sticks, fans, clothes. An Onapoor monkey learnt to brush its own clothes and shoes. The history of the human race itself is a history of gradual evolution in tool-making and using. If man is the special creation for which so many contend, we should expect to find that from the outset his tools were of some degree of com­ plexity. But, as a matter of fact, we find the most beautiful gradation from the wonderful and intricate machinery used by �46 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. men to-day down to stocks and stones. The iron age suc­ ceeded that of bronze, as the bronze succeeded that of stone. And the age of the stone implements shows evolution within itself, so that the geologist and anthropologist mark off the neo­ lithic from the palaeolithic, veos (neos) = ; waXato; (palaios) = ancient; Axdos (lithos) = stone. The neolithic stone implements are of a better fashion than the palaeolithic. The simplest forms of the palaeolithic tools are the merest modifica­ tion of natural objects, requiring not a whit more intelligence and skill than that shown by numbers of animals that are regarded as man’s inferiors. 3. The use offire.—Qi human beings that are without the use of fire we mention the dwellers in the Marianne, Ladrone, or Thieves Islands of the South Seas, the Dokos of Abyssinia, the Mincopies, and the dwellers in Teneriffe. The Australian aborigines never used warm water, and if the fire-stick they used went out they had to go to another tribe for a light. The Tasmanians also are unable to relight their fire-sticks if they once go out. We have seen already that the anthropoid ape, at least, has the capacity for using fire and for understanding the niceties of furnaces and ovens. Thus De Grandpre, quoted by Biichner, tells us of a chimpanzee that heated the oven, let no coals fall, and summoned the baker when the temperature was as high as it ought to be. 4. Dress.—Some of the brute-men peoples never use clothes. The Tasmanian and Australian aborigines, the cave-dwellers, whom Dr. Mitchell, of Edinburgh, studied in Wick Bay, Caithness, and described in the Daily Review, Edinburgh, February 10, 1877; the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands wear no clothing, and the Egyptian fellahs, working for the iniquitous bond-holders, might, if they knew Shakspere and the Bible, quote Lancelot Gobbo and Genesis, “ with a diffe­ rence.” “ The old text is very well parted between our masters and us; we are naked and they are not ashamed.” A baboon has been known to use a straw mat as covering for the head. Another animal of the same kind was wont to wrap himself in a sheepskin like a Kaffir. According to the Graphic of March 6, 1873, a female orang who lived at the .'ardin des Plantes, in Paris, used to wear a surtout, which she <ould prudishly draw down over her feet when stranger? ’ -me near. To the student, whose delight is to see our �THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 47 human habits making their first appearance low down in the animal kingdom, the fact will be of interest that the larva of a species of fly will dress itself with the cast-off skins of plant lice and, if these fail, with pieces of silk or of paper. . 5. Houses.—Of human beings who have no buildings in which they dwell, the following may be taken. The Caribs use only natural shelter afforded by rocks, caves and trees. The bushmen of South Africa have neither huts nor sheds. They live in holes dug by hand in the ground. The Dokos have no dwellings; the Veddas of Ceylon and the jungle dwarfs of the Western Ghats, in certain districts of India, are in the same condition. The Australians make a daily dwelling of boughs, and abandon it the next day. The Tasmanians have not even this temporary dwelling-place. The orang in the Eastern world and the chimpanzee in Africa build platforms on which they sleep. The gorilla builds huts. The probability that the immediate ancestor of man was a tree-haunting animal has already been mentioned. The fact that many of the lower human races live in or on trees is in keeping with this. The ape-men of India and the Veddas of Ceylon live in hollow trees. The Bukones roost in trees on platforms made of sticks, exactly after the manner of the orang and the chimpanzee. 6. Property.—Even in comparatively lowly organised animals the notion of property and the recognition of another’s property is to be seen. The monkey mentioned by Darwin, who having used a stone for breaking open his nuts secreted it in a corner of his cage, and allowed no other monkey to use it, and the dog with his bone, or a cat with her own basket, are cases in animals recognised as highly intelligent. But among the Insecta we find an idea of property in common. The best known instance is that of the ants who keep aphides or plant-lice as cows. Beetles are kept as domestic animals by ants for the sake of the sugar they yield, and in some ant-nests are found small blind beetles and wood-lice that live with the wiser or stronger ants as cats and dogs with men. 7. Language.—The advocates of the sad idea of man’s special creation, speak of the language of man as articulate and that of other animals as inarticulate. I cannot find any satisfactory meaning for this word “ articulate,” except “intelligible to man.” ana’ this is a purely artificial dis­ �48 THE ORIGIN OF MAN. tinction. But besides making this distinction without a difference, the special creationists fail to notice the following facts. First, man is bom without the power of speech. Second, in many cases he never acquires that power. Third, several animals are known to use even that which is crudely labelled articulate language and to use it with intention, and with a clear sense of the meaning of the words used and of their bearing on events of people. Fourth, in many other animals who would not be granted in human phraseology the power of articulate speech, there are none the less the germs of that power. There have been dumb people in all ages and nations. In the cases of the microcephali, or ape-men, articulate language is wanting almost completely. Of the forty-two examples of this reversion to the ancestral type that are recorded in Vogt’s “ Memoires des Microcophales,” not one was ever known to string together words in such a way as to make a definite sentence. Not more than four out of the forty-two were ever known to speak even single words. The dog has at least five distinct notes in his voice. The Cebus Azarae, on whom so many of the observations of Brehm were made, has six notes. The fowl is said to have twelve. The Hylobates, or Gibbon, to whom reference has already been made in other connexions, has a whole octave of notes within the compass of his voice. 8. The God-idea.—The best disproof of this, the last of the human prerogatives, is given in Sir John Lubbocks “Pre­ historic Times ” (ed. 1872). Not only have we in these examples evidence that whole tribes have no belief in, no idea of a god, but in many cases there is no such thing as anything that could by any stretch of courteous imagination be called a religion. The conclusion to which Lubbock, comes is that of all who have really studied the subject: “ There does not appear to be any sufficient reason for supposing that these miserable beings are at all inferior to the ancestors from whom they are descended.” �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. By EDWARD AVELING, D.Sc. ♦ Chapter I.—INTRODUCTION and CLASSIFICATION. This chapter, and its three successors, form the c-ontinuation of two other series: “The Darwinian Theory,” and “The Origin of Man,” and they form at the same time .the con­ clusion of a work I had planned. The design was to give an account, at once popular and accurate (1) of the principal generalisations bearing upon the theories of Darwin in general and upon their application to the human race in parti­ cular ; (2) of the chiqf facts upon which the generalisations are based. In “ The Darwinian Theory ” the general conclusions upon the origin of organic species were considered. In “The Origin of Man ” some of the evidence upon which is based the certainty that the human race has evolved from some lower form was given. The work which now lies before us is of a more general nature. The design is to give a series of facts as to the anatomical structure of man and his allies that bear upon the question of their origin and point to the conclusion that their origin is common. All the facts as yet observed and recorded lead, upon reflection, to the conclusion that the man-like apes and man have sprung from a form that was the parent of both a] a �2 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. and man. In a word, the details now to be given will cor­ roborate that which was stated in “The Origin of Man” (p. 3) : “ That in every point of structure .... there is a greater difference between man and man than between man and ape, i.e., the interval between the highest man and the lowest man in regard to any anatomical .... point is greater than it is between the lowest man and the highest ape.” Nor, in studying these details, must we lose sight of the fact also recorded on p. 3, that we have to do not with the highest only, but with the lowliest also of men. Upon one point let me again utter a word of warning. It is against the dangerous phrase “ connecting links.” There is danger in using this phrase in relation.to man and his allies. Low types of the human race, high types of the Simian, monsters like the ape-men, are not connecting links between the genus Homo (Man) and the genera, Gorilla, Troglodytes (Chimpanzee), Pithecus (Orang), Hylobates (Gibbon). Homo is probably not a result of evolution from any of the existing forms. Homo and these have probably had a common ancestry and ancestor. The plan of these chapters is as follows. In the rest of this first chapter so much of zoological classification as is necessary to the uhderstanding of the facts to be noted will be given. The facts themselves -will then be ranged under certain heads corresponding with those that enter into the plan of work in my General Biology. The order pursued here will not be exactly the same as that followed in the more technical work, and generally in my biological teach­ ing. In the second chapter the erect posture, the hair covering, the height, teeth, blood vessels, muscles and re­ productive organs will be considered. The third chapter will be wholly devoted to the skeleton, and the fourth to the brain. A.—Classification. The Kingdom Animalia is divided artificially into certain groups known as Sub-kingdoms. Of these the only one with which we are concerned at present is the highest, or the Verte­ brata. This group, commonly known as that of the back­ boned animals, is marked off from other sub-kingdo-ms by characteristics that, as a rule, distinguish its members from �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 3 those of other and lower groups. It will be understood that in giving these characteristics the zoologist is quite conscious of the arbitrary way in which he proceeds, and is aware that in the lower Vertebrata, as in the higher members of the sub­ kingdoms grouped heterogeneously under the name Invertebrata, characters are found that demonstrate the im­ possibility of. drawing impassable lines of demarcation and therefore of rigid, hard and fast definition. The characteristics of the sub-kingdom Vertebrata are as follows :—(1) The possession of a skeleton that runs along the length of the body in the middle line. (2) The separation of the body by this longitudinal, axial skeleton into a smaller dorsal and a larger ventral region. Dorsum, = back, venter = belly. (3) The occupation of the smaller, dorsal region by the central part of the nervous system, and the occupation of the larger, ventral region by the digestive canal, the respira­ tory and circulatory apparatus and other organs. The upper region of the vertebrate body is the neural (vtvpov, neuron = a nerve); the lower is the enteric (evrepov, enteron = intes­ tine). • (4) Certain thickenings or arches, at the anterior and lateral region of the embryonic body, with clefts, between them. These are the gill-arches and gill-clefts of fishes, and are represented in man by the lower jaw and hyoid bone [“ Origin of Man,” pp. 7, 8J. (5) The possession of not more than four limbs. (6) Jaws that are part of the walls of the head, and teeth that are hardenings of the mucous membrane of the digestive canal. (7) A complete blood­ system, with a heart that is provided with valves and a hepa­ tic portal system, i.e., a set of vessels carrying the venous or used-up blood from the digestive canal, not at once to the heart, after the fashion of venous blood generally, but round by way of the liver. Hepar = liver, porta — gate. The origin of the name “ hepatic ” is evident. The word “ portal ** comes from a mistaken notion, natural enough before the discovery of the lacteals or .absorbents of the digestive canal by Aselhus in 1622 and of their function by Pequet in 1649 Until these vessels were recognised as the way and means by which the fluid chyle—result of food digestion—was carried from the digestive canal into the blood system, the belief was held that the chyje went by way of the hepatic portal vein, which thus acted as a gate for the entrance of digested food �4 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. into the blood. A passage from Bacon’s “ Essay of Empires ** (Essay xix.), written in 1625, runs thus: “For their mer­ chants, they are vena porta ; and if they flourish not, a kingdom may have good limbs, but will have empty veins, and nourish little.” The sub-kingdom Vertebrata is divided into groups that lead us at length to Classes. Of these last, the highest is the class Mammalia, commonly known as those that suckle their young (mamma = breast), or yet more roughly as quadrupedsThe chief marks of the Mammalia are as follows :—(1) Hair­ covering. (2) Heart with four cavities. (3) Some of the blood-corpuscles red and without a nucleus or more solid internal part. (4) The aorta or large vessel that carries the good, arterial blood from the heart to be distributed to the body generally, makes a single arch towards the left side of the body. In Reptiles two aortic arches, one on each side, in Birds one aortic arch, towards the right side of the body, occur. (5) Breathing by lungs. (6) Mammary glands. The class Mammalia is again artificially broken up intoOrders, fourteen in number. The highest of these is the order Primates or Quadrumana. Primus = first or highest. Quatuor — four; manus — hand. This order is marked off from its fellows among the Mammalia by characteristics, some of which have to do with the skeleton, others with the repro­ ductive organs and processes. For our present purpose, it will’ be enough to say that the Primates present the following marks :—(1) One pair of clavicles or collar-bones ; not two, as in Birds and the lowest Mammalia. (2) A placenta or vascular organ connecting the mother and the child before birth. (3} Incisor, canine and molar teeth present. (4) The placenta deciduate (deciduus — falling off), i.e., coming away entirely after birth. (5) The placenta discoidal, or applied only at one definite region of the embryo, so as to be disk-like in shape. (6) Mammae pectoral (pectus — breast) in position. (7) Hallux (big tee) with a flat nail and capable of some movement. So far, then, our monkeys, apes and men are all members of the Kingdom Animalia, the sub-kingdom Vertebrata, the class Mammalia, the order Primates. The further working out of their classification will be better understood if the table now given is first studied and then referred to •*« th«r text is read. �PRIMATES. Simiadae Lemuridae t>ro a- •-* ® pr & 2- 5 2. *< o s *■* a *3 a 2 a x. 2. a C L A S S IF IC A T IO N OF KKKMWBM M K W HSO^B’CPH© ET'd B“o°g<M'£.o£ 3 <<! £ ® ® £72 3 3AAS 3 P R IM A T E S . S’S ? ® B £ £- §■ tr cr S’ ® r? 2 >>i>2S B B-* > ® 2 22. p �6 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. The order Primates is divided into three sub-orders. (0 Lemuridse, thus named as it includes the Lemur of Madagascar. This sub-order is identical with the Mammalian order of Haeckel and Gegenbauer, known as Prosimiae (pro = before, simia = ape) or half-apes. In my translation of Haeckel (“Pedigree of Man,” pp. 77, 86, etc.) the Prosimiae are often mentioned as an order representing in its members the per­ sistent forms of the ancestors of all monkeys, apes and men. That tliis last truth still holds to the full, although here for convenience’ sake the Lemur group is regarded as a sub-order, shows at once the artificiality of all classification, the reality of Evolution. (2) Simiadae (monkeys and apes). (3) Anthropidse ; avOpanros (anthropos) = man. The sub-order Lemuridae or Prosimiae has two divisions, (a) Cheiromyini, represented by the Cheiromys of Madagascar woods, (b) Lemurini, represented by the Maki or true Lemur. The sub-order Simiadae has three divisions, (a) Arctopithecini : apicros (arktos) «= a bear ; ttlO'tjko's (pithecos) = an ape. This family is represented by the marmo­ set, more squirrel-like than bear-like. (b) Platyrrhini: ttAcctus (platus) = broad ; pis, pivos (rhis, rhinos) = nose. The technical name comes from the breadth of the partition between the two nostrils. Unlike the Catarrhines and man, the members of this group have their nostrils widely separated, and the nose in consequence wide and flat. To ease the mind of the anxious reader, I may here state that the asterisks in the table have no deeper significance than this : they are affixed to such generic names as are only illustrative, not exhaustive. For example, the families Arctopithecini and Platyrrhini contain many more genera respect tively than the exemplar ones, Arctopithecus, Ateles and Mycetes. Where the asterisk is not used the genera given are illustrative and exhaustive. For example, the four names given in lines 6-9 of the table exhaust the list of the man­ like apes, fcj Oatarrhini; Kara (kata) = (in composition) down­ wards. The technical name comes from the fact that, whilst the partition between the two nostrils is narrow in all the members of this group, the nose-openings look downwards towards the ground, like those of man. In the Platyrrhini the nose-openings look either outwar4® or upwards. �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 7 This third family, Catarrhini, of the second Bub-order, Simiadae, of the order Primates, has two tribes. (1) Cynomorpha : kv&>v, kwos (kuon, kunos) = a dog ; p.op<^r) (morphg) = form. Quadrupedal, dog-like apes, of the baboon type. (2) Anthropomorpha, i.e., man-like or anthropoid apes; «3os (eidos) =resemblance. Here, for the first time, all the genera are given; and here it is necessary. For now we are hard-by man and we must have a clear conception of the names of his nearest allies. They are the Gibbon, the Chimpanzee, the Orang, the Gorilla. They are placed as near by as is possible in ascending order. There is no doubt as to the position at the bottom of the list of Hylobates, and little as to the position of Gorilla at the top. The other two are, however, uncertain. In some respects the Orang, in others the Chimpanzee is the higher. It will be noted that the Gorilla is here separated as a distinct genus from the Chimpanzee. Some zoologists place these two man-like apes in the same genus. The importance of a clear understanding of these anthro­ pomorphic apes will be understood when the following quota­ tion from Darwin’s “ Descent of Man ” is read: “ There can •consequently hardly be a doubt that man is an offshoot from the Old World Simian stem ; and that, under a genealogical point of view, he must be classed with the Catarrhine divi­ sion ” (edition 2, p. 153). Finally, the sub-order Anthropidae contains, according to the views at present held, only one genus, Homo. In classi­ fying the members of this genus, I follow the plan of Haeckel (“ Pedigree of Man,” p. 86), to whose interesting essay the reader is referred for details. Thus, the species of this very heterogeneous genus are arranged in two groups. The Ulbtrichi take their name from vXos (ulos) = wool and 3pt.$, TpL\o<; (thrix, trichos) = hair. The ha’r is crisp and woolly, the skin dark in color, the skulls dolichocephalic (long-headed). The Leiotrichi or Lissotrichi take their name from Xetos (leios) =flat, or Xwaos (lissos) = smooth. The hair is smooth, the skin paler of hue and the skulls generally brachycephalic (short-headed). Under the former head, Ulotrichi, range four species, whose nature and habitat will be easily gathered from the table. Under the latter head, Leotrichi, range six species. All the comment necessary in regard to them affects the last �8 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. three. In H. arcticus we see the extreme modification of man under the extreme conditions of arctic environment. H. americanus is held by Haeckel to be a variation from H. mongolus, whilst H. mediterraneus, or the Caucasian, is believed to hold a like relation to H.. polynesius. The last of the ten species is divided again into xanthochroic and melanochroic groups : £av()o<s (xanthos) = yellow ; \poa (chroa) => color of the skin; /xeXas, /zeXavo; (melas, melanos) = black. The former are more “ inland bred ” ; the latter haunt the Chores of the Mediterranean. When m 3 reflect in what an exceedingly striking way >bese various divisions of the group Homo differ, and what distinct varieties are arranged even under each of these socalled species, we are led to consider whether this regarding Man as a single genus is accurate, even when the genus is only looked upon as an artificial group. We cannot but think that here the ancient myth has not been without its effect on those who are most unconscious of the influence. Possibly as work goes on and as the idea that the human race sprang from one original pair of progenitors vanishes wholly, the idea that the initial variation whence Man arose from anthro­ poid occurred only at o<ie time or place may also vanish, and Homo be looked upon as not a single genus. In giving the facts now to be given as to monkeys, apes and men. for the most part the last-named will be considered as a whole, and the fact given will be true of man generally. But in some special cases measurements of different human peoples help, and will be given. At present the area of aijthropometric observations is limited. But such results as have been obtained lead us to believe that if that area were to-extens ve with that of human beings, and if, within it, ill details were thoroughly worked out, the conclusion to which we are led would be yet more assured. The acknowledgments I ought to make for the facts now to be noted would really cover the whole series of writers on comparative anatomy during the last few years. Three names, however, demand especial mention—Gegenbauer, Huxley, Flower. �9 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. ■ CHAPTER II. B.—General Facts. ^Before directing attention to the special evidence afforded "by the skeleton and by the brain, a number of general pieces of evidence will be considered here. They are placed under the following heads. Posture, hair-covering, height, teeth, blood-vessels, muscles, reproductive organs. The student is Asked, in reading the succeeding pages, to make constant reference to the table of the Primates on page 5. 1. Posture.—The erect posture of the human being was, And still is by the ignorant, instanced in evidence of man’s special creation. In the first place, a more thoughtful study of man himself helps to dispel this idea. For the child, whose life is always an epitome of the evolution of the race, •does not at first walk erect. It crawls, lower-animal fashion, on all-fours. And again, in the microcephali, or ape-men, we find reversion here as in all other points. The ape­ children do not learn to walk erect until some years after the usual human time. The ape-men and women often make use of, and in some cases seem to prefer, a partially quadru­ pedal mode of progression. Following out, however, the plan that is to be special to these chapters, let us look at the habitual and at the oc•casional postures of the body in the order Primates. All the Lemuridae are quadrupedal all through their lives. They never walk erect. In the Simiadse, considered as a sub-order, "the longitudinal axis of the body is in the lower forms horizontal. In those a little higher in the scale it assumes an inclined direction, the angle it makes with the ground increasing gradually, until in the highest forms the angle Approaches habitually to 90°, and is often quite 90°, i.e., the axis approaches and, on occasion, actually attains a vertical position. This general statement as to the Simiadae may be sup­ plemented by a note or two on individual monkeys and apes "that belong to this group. The marmoset is habitually quadrupedal. The platyrrhine monkeys also are habitually •on all-fours, but one of them at least, the Spider Monkey, ■occasionally rises to an erect posture. The Cynomorpha, or baboon division, are, as all readers of travels know, very �10 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. frequently on their hind-legs, and the Anthropomorpha ar* semi-erect when they pass from place to place. Nor must we forget that the favorite resting-pose of some of the apes, notably the Chimpanzee, leaning forward and resting on theknuckles of the hand, is the position assumed by the ape-men when in repose. It is the position represented in the photo­ graph of Marguerite Maehler, ape-woman, of Rieneck in Germany. And if the reader will try the experiment, as I have just tried it, of crouching to the ground and throwing' the weight of the body to some extent on to the hand placed on the ground in front, I expect he will find as I did, that the fingers are unconsciously flexed, and he rests on the knuckles rather than on the tips of the fingers. Of course the experi­ ment is best tried with some one ignorant of its purpose. In this first inquiry, notice the succession of adjectives and adverbs. Always quadruped (Lemur), habitually (spider monkey), generally (baboon), frequently (chimpanzee), abnormally (man). 2. Hair Covering.—Upon this topic generally something was said on pages 4 and 5 of the “ Origin of Man.” In this connection we need only say a word or two on the transition changes. The Lemurs have a covering that cannot be called hair. It is fur rather than hair. This is true also of the marmoset and the platyrrhine, or New World monkeys. In the Oynomorpha and Anthropomorpha fur is replaced by hair, which in its turn begins to disappear, even in these groups, and in man is, in anything like noticeable quantity, restricted to particular regions of the body. Thus in theCynomorpha we meet for the first time with those bareportions of the body known as callosities (callosus = with a hard skin). It is true that by their prominent position and by the brightness of their color, these callosities present a remarkable appearance, and actually play, by their attractive­ ness to the opposite sex, a part in sexual selection. But for our present purpose their chief interest lies in the fact that they are parts of the body from which the hair covering isvanishing. The general principle of hair-vanishing has set in. The Gibbon, lowest of anthropoid apes, has this general principle carried out in the same special way as in theCynomorpha. The Gibbon has callosities. But in the rest of the manlike Simiadae the principle affects other regions of �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 11 the body. Thus in the Chimpanzee, Orang and Gorilla, the hands, feet and face are bare. And in man the process of hair-vanishing has extended more or less completely from the hands to the arms, from the feet to the legs, from the face to the neck, and from all these to the trunk of the animal. 3. Height.—Pace by pace with the assumption of the erect posture, advances the increase in the length or height of the Primates. The Lemuridae, the marmoset, the spider-monkey, are not longer than 3 feet. The Cynomorpha have a length, that is very generally a height, of about 4 feet. In the lowest of the anthropoids a reversion seems to occur. The Gibbon is usually some 3 feet in height. But after this genus the transition in height is interesting. The average stature of the Orang is some 4 feet 6 inches; of the Chimpanzee 5 feet; of the Gorilla from 5 feet to 5 feet 6 inches; of the higher races of man from feet to 6 feet. 4. The Teeth.—Once again, for generals, the reference is pp. 8 and 9 of “The Origin of Man.” The particular facts as to the teeth will now be given and will have to do, for the most part, with their number. To understand them, it is necessary to remind the student of the nature and the number of teeth in the human skull. Consider one jaw only—say the upper. Its fellow—say the lower—is almost its identical counterpart. Starting from the middle line just under the partition between the two nostrils and working to one side—say the right—we find (1) two chisel-like teeth, useful for cutting into the food, and hence called incisors (incido = I cut into); (2) one sharppointed tooth, very useless to civilised man, but of a type much more frequent in purely flesh-eating animals called canine (canis — a dog); (3) two more massive teeth (I am always speaking of the adult jaw), whose free parts or crowns have two eminences or cusps, and thus give the teeth the name of bicuspids; (4) three yet more massive teeth, each, with four or five cusps, the molars (molea = a mill) that crush the food as millstones crush grain. The two teeth on each side mentioned under (3) are known by another name than that of bicuspids. As they are in front of the molars, and as they, like these, crush or “mill ” the food, the com­ parative anatomist calls them pre-molar. Henoe there are in each half of each jaw 8 teeth—in all �12 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 82. Time will be saved if the reader masters the very simple dental formula of man. Then he will be able, on reading ■those of other Primates, to compare easily the facts repre­ sented by the formulae. Here is that of adult man 1—1 e. ------1—1 2—2 i. ------2—2 2—2 n.’fl. ------2—2 3— 3 m. ------3-3 Tn this the initials indicate the kind of teeth, the numbers .above the horizontal line tell of the teeth in the upper jaw, the numbers below of the teeth in the under jaw, whilst The dashes mark as it were the median vertical line of the ■face, and guide us to the knowledge of the distribution of the teeth in the right and left half of the jaw respectively. In the Lemuridae the dental formula differs in the two divisions. In the Cheiromyini, the lower of the two, it runs thus 1—1 i. ------1—1 0 c. — 0 4—4 p.m. and m. ------r 4-4 'There is only one incisor on each side of each jaw; there are no canines at all; and there are four grinding teeth on each -side above and below. Now this arrangement of the teeth is unlike that in all other members of the order Primates, and is very much like that seen in the Rodentia or gnawing mammals. Moreover, the incisors continue to grow after they are once formed, and are only kept at a normal length by the wearing of the upper ones against the lower. And this is ■exactly what occurs in the Rodentia. In the higher division Lemurini of the sub-order Lemuridse, the normal formula is— 2—2 £. ------2—2 1—1 c. ------1—1 3— 3 p.m. ------3— 3 2— 2 3—8 m. ------- or------2—2 3 —3 But the evolutionist will not be surprised to hear that in two 2__2 -genera of this group the incisors are and in one of these the outer incisors, right and left, in the upper jaw very soon fall out, leaving the formula j—p Here is a beautiful -example of gradation : Cheiromys has Tarsius (of the �13 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 1_ 1 2__2 x Lemurini), later on y—; at first j—=■; Lichanotus (of theLemuridse) always ——; the rest of the division -— Turning to the Simiadae, the marmoset has— 2—2 i. ------2 —2 c. 1—1 " 1 1—1 3—3 p.m. ------r 3-3 2—2 m. ------2— 2 Here, whilst the number of teeth is the same zas in man, a slight difference of arrangement obtains. The Arctopithecini have a pre-molar more and a molar less than the Anthropidae. The New World platyrrhine members of the order have 36 teeth in all, or 4 more than we have. The difference is in the pre-molars, always the most variable teeth. The formula shows this. 2 —2 i. ----2—2 1—1 c. -----1—1 3-3 p.m. -----3— 3 3 —3 m. — 3—3 But the Catarrhini, dog-like and man-like, have a teetharrangement identical, as far as numbers go, with ours. Their formula runs :— 2 —2 i. -----2—2 1—1 ’ 1—1 2—2 p.m. -----2— 2 3-3 m. -----3-3 This is but one of the very many reasons that compelled Darwin to write the passage quoted on page 7. Two other points have to be considered in respect to the teeth. One is the presence or absence of diastemata ; Siaorvy/za (diastema) = an interval. In the Lemurini a diastema occurs between the two incisors on the right and the two on the left in the upper jaw, i.e., occurs in the middle line. The Cynomorpha present a diastema in each jaw ; in the upper jaw between the outer molar and the canine, in the lower between the canine and the first pre-molar. Such a gap also occurs in the Anthropomorpha, but in the female Chimpanzee it is nearly closed up—quite as nearly as in many human beings, although it is usual to say that in man there is no diastema. The last note under this head is as to the relative sizes of the incisor teeth. In us the two incisors of the- upper- jaw that are nearer the median line are larger than the two outer ones that lie to their right and left. In the lower jaw the �14 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. -converse obtains, and the inner incisors are smaller than the outer. Exactly the same peculiarity of arrangement is to be seen in the incisor teeth of the upper and lower jaws of the anthropoid apes. 5. .Blood-vessels.—A whole history might be written upon the distribution of the chief vessels of the blood-system in Man and his allies, and its details would exhibit innumerable interesting gradations from the lowest of the Primates to the highest. Only one point, more as an example than as a type, will be given. The great blood-vessel that carries the good blood from the left side of the heart for distribution to the body generally is known as the aorta. It makes in all mammals normally a curve to the left hand before reaching the middle line and posterior part of the body cavity. From this curved por­ tion, the aortic arch, the arteries arise that convey the blood to the upper limbs and to the head and neck. In all, these arteries are four in number. (1) Two sub-clavians carrying the. blood to the right and left limbs. (2) Two carotids going to the neck and head. In man these four vessels take origin from the arch of the aorta as three, one of which almost at once divides into two. As the aorta curves towards the left it gives off first, that is, most to the right of the man to whom it belongs, the right sub-clavian (sub = under, clavicle = the collar-bone), second, the right carotid, third, the innominate (nameless) artery, which almost at once divides into the left carotid and the left sub-clavian. In the Cynomorpha, and in Hylobates or Gibbon, the lowest anthropomorph, a different arrangement is seen. In these Simiadse the aortic arch only gives rise to two vessels, one of which almost directly divides into three. The single vessel is most to the left and is the left sub-clavian artery. The innomi­ nate divides in these animals into (from left to right) the left carotid, the right carotid, the right sub-clavian. Ascending through the anthropoid apes we find that whilst, as already mentioned, the Gibbon has the arrangement of one sub-clavian and one innominate, the genus Pithecus (Oran^ has in some species the same grouping, but in others an aortic arch with its vessels placed as in man, i.e., with three arising from the arch. The Chimpanzee and Gorilla groups have hroughout all their members the human arrangement. Once �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 15 more the difference is between ape and ape and wt between ape and man. 6. Muscles. — Some general facts under this head were given under anatomical facts (“ Origin of Man,” pp. 12-14). As the present work is altogether more special, one or two more ■details may be added. First, as to the tail muscles. All the Primates up to the Cynomorpha have tails and are well-provided with tail-muscles. In the Oynomorpha there is one genus, Inuus, which is without a tail. But the muscles are present. In the man-like apes not only is the tail wanting. In many cases the tail-muscles are as absent as they are in man. But, as if no chance of ■error should be allowed, in some of the tailless apes the tail­ muscles are present in a very rudimentary condition. Next, a word or two upon the half-dozen doubtful or variable muscles. I said that three or four muscles are met with in Hylobates, Pithecus, Troglodytes and Gorilla that are not usually seen in man. These are (1) the levator claviculce (raiser of the little clavicle), a muscle belonging to the shoulder region ; (2) dorso-epi-trochlearis, or accessorius tricipitis, a narrow muscle running down from the latissimus dorsi (broadest of the back) to the triceps (three-headed) muscle at the back of the upper arm ; (8) the scansorius (climbing muscle); (4) the abductor ossis metacarpi quinti digiti (drawer outwards of the metacarpal or palm-bone of the little finger). Of these the third has not been described in the Gorilla and is also absent in some Chimpanzees, whilst all four of the muscles are occasionally found in human subjects. Further, man has two muscles not as yet seen in the Anthropomorpha: (1) Extensor primi intemodii pollicis (straightener of the first division of the thumb); (2) peronaus tertius (third muscle of the fibula or outer bone of the leg). But (1) is by many anatomists said to exist in the Chimpan­ zee, and is sometimes wanting in man, whilst (2) is frequently absent in Homo. As throwing some light upon the variable character of the muscular arrangements, even in very closely allied animals, I may mention that Hylobates has a muscle all to itself. The abductor tertii internodii secundi digiti (drawer outwards of the third division of the second digit or forefinger) has been encountered as yet in no other mammal. The Orang alsr. it �16 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. tb.e sole possessor of an opponens hallucis or muscle for opposing the big toe to the other toes, as the thumb i* opposed to the finger-tips. As a last contribution to this brief study of Primate muscles, it may be noted that in the spider-monkey, whosethumb is rudimentary and does not perform any movements, four are present out of the five muscles that in other mem bers of the order serve to move the thumb. 7. Reproductive Organs.—It will be readily understood that in a short popular work no complete details are likely to begiven under this head. If the work is popular the anato­ mical details necessary to the understanding of the facts would have to be given. For myself I think they ought to be given, and I should not hesitate to give them any more than I hesitate to describe the skeleton or the bones. But the details necessary would take up far more space than can be afforded, and the comparative results obtained would hardly repay us. For it may at once be stated that in all anatomical points the structure of the re­ productive organs of man and that of his allies are practi­ cally identical. Two notes only, therefore, to end this chapter. Theposition of the milk-yie1 ding glands. In man, and iu almost’ all the rest of the Primates, the mammary glands are two in number, and are situated on the breast. They are pectoral in position, as comparative anatomists say. But in thelowest members of the order, i.e., in the Lemuridee, there arein some cases, in addition to the two pectoral, two or more pairs of mammary glands on the abdomen, as they are in thedog. Lastly, from the Cynomorpha upwards, the female Primatesexperience at regular intervals that in the anthropoids certainly approximate very closely to, if they are not identical with, the lunar periods, a condition of the sexual organs in no essential removed from the periodical visitations of the human female adult when unimpregnated. �MONKEYS, APES. MEN. CHAPTER 17 III. 0.—The Skeleton. By the skeleton, comparative anatomists mean the hard pro­ tective or supporting part of the animal organism. Thus, the hard, outer part of the body of a lobster, or the two parts of the shell of an oyster, or the single shell of a snail, are all, strictly speaking, skeletons. All the ordinary Verte­ brate classes have hard parts without and within. * Thus, in the Mammalia there is. an outer or exoskeleton (exo) = on the outside] of fur or hair, and an endoskeleton [evSov (endon) = within] of bones. Upon the former of these I dwelt in the preceding chapter. In the present chapter facts will be given as to the bony skeletons of the various mem­ bers of the order Primates that will serve once again to show interesting transitions in anatomical structure from monkey to ape and from ape to man. All that is to be said will necessarily be more easily intelligible to one who knows something of human anatomy. But I proceed on the assumjr tion that the reader is wholly unacquainted with that brand of knowledge. A picture of the human skeleton or, still better, an actual skeleton for reference, will make the text more comprehendable. Following the plan of my Physiological Tables, pp. 4 and 5, we shall study the skeleton under the three divisions of th( trunk, the extremities, the skull. Considering the trunk, we shall deal first with the vertebral column or backbone, second with the ribs. The extremities, upper and lower, will present us with the arch that supports and the line's that is supported. The skull consists of head and face. 1. The Trunk.—(a) Vertebral column. The backbone, characteristic of all Vertebrata, consists of a number of separate bones called vertebrae. In Mammalia, and therefore in the Primates, these vertebrae are divided by anatomists into groups. From above downwards the groups are : (1) Cervical vertebrae (cervix = the neck); (2) Dorsal (dorsum = back), carrying the ribs; (3) Lumbar (iumhi = loins); (4) Sacral; (5) Caudal, or coccygeal. In this preliminary explanation only the last two sets call for comment. The sacral vertebrae are thus named because the bone they form was offered as a specially sacred part of the body to the gods. B �18 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. This bona, the sacrum, made up of consolidated vertebrae, is wedged in between the two hip-bones, and makes with them the strong basin or pelvis that rests upon the legs. Cauda =— a tail, and the caudal vertebrae are those of the tail. In human anatomy these 1 educed rudimentary tail-verte­ brae make a little bone at the lower end of the vertebral column. This bone is the os coccygis, so-named from a fancied resemblance to a cuckoo’s bill (“ Origin of Man,” page 6). Let us look first at the backbone as a whole, and then at the individual groups of vertebrae. Our backbone shows three very remarkable curves, upon which depends, in a measure, the power of resistance to shock. One is in the dorsal region, and the convex side of the curve is backwards; another in the lumbar, and the convex side forwards; the third in the sacral and coccygeal, with convex side backwards. Not any of the Primates exhibit these curves except the anthro­ poid apes and man. Up to the Oynomorpha, they are want­ ing. Even in the Anthropomorpha their appearance is graduated in an interesting way. The vertebral column of the Gibbon is nearly straight; only the sacral curve, the lowest of the three, appearing. In the Orang, the curves of the adult anthropoid are like those present in the human being at birth. In the Chimpanzee, the curves as they are in the backbone of the adult man begin to appear, and in the Gorilla they are much better marked. 1. Cervical vertebrae. In all the Primates, and indeed in <11 Mammalia, the number of these is seven. This is the more remarkable when we reflect that the fact is true equally of the neck of the giraffe, and of the elephant. In our present study only one point is of moment. Every budding anatomist, and therefore every first-year “medical,” knows that in man the cervical vertebrae are distinguished from the other kinds by certain marks, of which one is the bifurcation of the spinous process, i.e., of the process, which running backwards from the body of .the vertebra, forms, with its thirty odd fellows, the ridge on the middle line of the back. None of the lower Primates exhibits this bifurcation, and only one of the anthropoids, the Chimpanzee. Even in the Chimpanzee, Inly one of the cervical vertebrae, the second of the seven, has this characteristic. It is significant that the bifurcation �MONKEYS, APES. MEN. 19 \ •does appear, even in this not very noticeable form, below man. 2 and 3. The dorsal and lumbar vertebrae may be taken together. Their interest lies in their number. Repetition of similar forms always implies comparative lowness of organisation. A comparison of the many similar segments of an earthworm with the fewer, more differentiated segments of a lobster, will furnish an illustration of this truth. Hen«n we should expect to find, as we ascend in our investigation of the Primates, a decrease in the number of dorso-lumbai vertebrae. In some of the Lemuridae the number is over 20, the 12 or 13 dorsal being followed by as many as 9 lumbar. In the marmoset the dorso-lumbar are 19. In the Platyrrhini the number varies from as many as 22 (15 or 14 dorsal, 7 or 8 lumbar), to as few as 17 (12 dorsal, 5 lumbar, as in man). In the Cynomorpha the number is 19 (12 or 13, and 7 or 6). In the Gibbon of the Anthropomorpha the number is 18 (13 and 5). In the other three forms, the •Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, 17. In Man also there are 17. Whilst, however, the actual number of dorso-lumbar verte ■ brae is the same in the three highest anthropoids and in man, the distribution of the 17 between dorsal and lumbar verte* brae is very instructive. Thus the 17 of the Chimpanzee and the Gorilla are made up of 13 dorsal and 4 lumbar. The 17 of the Orang, however, are made up of 12 dorsal and 5 lumbar. And this is also the human arrangement. There are normally in man 12 dorsal and 5 lumbar vertebrae, and occasionally cases occur of 13 or 14 dorsal (the Gorilla type). ' One or two other facts in relation to the lumbar vertebrae, or rather to one of them, may be given. The one is the fifth or last lumbar, as existent in us and in our nearest allies. Two of the four man-like apes present peculiarities in the fifth lumbar. Both the Chimpanzee and the Gorilla have the transverse processes of this bone, that jut out right and left, joined to the crests of the two hip-bones, right and left. And further, in the Gorilla the body of the last lumbar vertebra i% fixed on to that of the first sacral, just as that ia to the second and the second to the third. In fact the fifth lumbar becomes, so to say, a part of the sacrum. Now, both these peculiarities are occasionally seen in Man. �20 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 4. Sacrum. In the Cynomorpha there are only three, sacral vertebrae. But in the Anthropoids, the number is thesame as in us, five. This increase in number at first, sight appears in contradiction to the principle given on p. 19. But it is related, in the highest Primates, to the erect posture, the greater strain on the legs, and the heavier work to bo done by the sacrum. 5. Caudal vertebrae. From the Lemuridae up to the Cynomorpha the caudal vertebrae are many in number, as the animals in these groups are “ tailed.” Thus, even in the highest group, the Cynomorpha, there are genera whose individuals have as many as 31 vertebrae. Yet even within. v the hunts of this sub-division of the Catarrhini occurs the genus Inuus, already mentioned as a tailless dog-ape. Inuushas only 3 caudal vertebrae. None of the Anthropomorpha has more than 5, and often as few as 4 or 3, the human numbers, occur. Nor is it only numerically that the tail-region of the vertebral column is identical in Anthropomorpha and Anthropidae. In the exceedingly reduced condition of thevertebrae the lower end of the column is identical in us and' in the man-like apes. (b) Ribs.—As the pairs of ribs correspond in number with: the dorsal vertebrae, there is little to say in this connection, and what is said is rather supplementary than actually new. Of course, here again the principle that repetition of similar parts means comparative lowness of organisation, comes into notice. In the snake, e.g., of the class Eeptilia, we have an immense number of almost precisely similar pairs of ribs. Turning to our Primates, the Lemuridae and Arctopithecini. (Aye-aye, Maki, marmoset) have always more than 14 pairs, and in some cases very many more. The Oynomorpha have 13 or 12, as a reference to p. 19, where the number of dorsal vertebrae (always the same as that of the pairs of ribs)-is given, shows. The Gibbon has rarely 14, generally 13. The Chimpanzee and Gorilla have 13 pairs. The Orang 12. Man has 12 pairs. As usual, the break is between ape and ape, not between ape and mah. II. The Extremities.—We shall take the upper limb first, and then the lower. 1. The arch of the upper limb. In man, and indeed, in all the Primates, this arch consists of the scapula, or blade- �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 21 tame, and the clavicle, or collar-bone. Of these two the •scapula alone need detain us. This is an oddly-shaped bone, whose main part is large and flat, overlying several of the ribs. At the upper outer corner is the glenoid cavity, into which fits the head of the arm-bone, or humerus. A strong process (the spine) rises from the back of the scapula much •nearer the top than the bottom of the bone, and joins at its free end with the clavicle. This last therefore runs from the top of the breast-bone to the end of the spine of the scapula. The scapula has three edges; an outer, running from the glenoid cavity down to the lower point of the bone, and •called the glenoid border; an upper, running in Man nearly horizontally, and a long curved inner edge or border. In the lower Primates right up to the Oynomorpha, the shape of “this complex bone is very different from that seen in man. The glenoid and upper borders are nearly of the same length, und the inner border is short and straight. Even in the ■Chimpanzee the shape is not yet human. The bone in this -anthropoid is very long, owing to the elongation of the inner and reduction of the upper border. In the Orang and the 'Gorilla, however, the bone has acquired all the human -characteristics in the main. 2. The arm. In studying the arm of the Primates a number of points present themselves. They will be arranged under the heads; length, humerus, the fore-arm, carpus (or wrist), manus (or hand). (a) The length of the arm. Every schoolboy knows the ■school way of measuring height. You stand with your back to a wall, and stretch out your arms to their full length and horizontally against it. Then some interested companion marks the place to which the tips of the middle fingers of the liands reach. The length from the tip of the one middle , finger to that of the other is as nearly as possible equal to the height of the body. Let us see the results of the like measurement made on members of the highest mammalian order, other than man. If the experiment is inade on any of the Lemuridse, Arctopithecini, Platyrrhini or Cynomorpha, the arm-length, as defined above, is always more than twice the body height. 'This is also true of the lowest anthropoid ape. The Gibbon’s ■arm-length is more than twice the body-height. In the �«2 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. Orang the arms are shortening relatively, and the arm-length is nearly twice the body-height. The Chimpanzee and Gorilla have an arm-length one and a half times the height, and in man, as we have seen, the two are approximately equal. Here for the first time we can take a measurement within the limits of the human race itself. And the measurement hall be one of precision, the result of a series of careBil observations and recordals made in America. All of us know generally that certain low types of individuals have greater length of arm than higher types. But the numbers now to be given have to do with classes rather than individuals, and: We of an especial interest as showing the effect of changed conditions (“Darwinian Theory,” p. 10) in the production of variation. If we stand erect and place the arms close against the sides, with the palms pressing against the thighs, the tip of the middle finger of each hand is found to be at some dis­ tance from the uppei edge of the knee-cap, dr patella. JDlearly, the longer the arm of a Primate, the less will be this distance, and, as is well known, in all of the order except Man, the distance is nothing, or less than nothing, i.e., thefingers reach beyond the upper edge of the knee-cap. That the arms are shortening relatively as the human race evolves ’ seems to be shown by the numbers now to be given. The men upon whom the measurement was made were of three types : Americans ; free negroes, whose parents had been free for some generations ; pure negroes. The average of a great many measurements made upon a large number of individuals of each of these three classes was as follows:— Distance from middle-finger tip to patella— Pure Negroes............................ Free Negroes ... ... ... Americans ............................ 2-88 inches. 3-293 „ 5-036 „ The numbers, as the descriptive reporters say, speak for them­ selves. (/?) The humerus is the long bone that runs from the shouldel to the elbow. Like all long bones, it presents three regions : a head above that articulates with the cavity in the scapula^ a long shaft in the middle, and at *the lower end, where thehumerus is jointed on with one of the arm bones, the condyles;- �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 28 kovSvXos (kondulos) = a knuckle. The head of the humerus in man has a direction upwards and inwards, but does not run backwards at all. On the other haud, the head of the humerus has a backward direction in the Lemundae, Arctopithecini, Platyrrhini and Cynomorpha. But in the Anthropomorpha the direction of the humerus-head is as it is in Man, not as it is in the Lower Primates. Again, the longitudinal axis of the humerus is in Man much twisted upon itself. It does not run straight, as in the lower Primates. But the three highest apes have the humerus-axis also twisted, and to an extent closely approxi­ mating to that seen in the human arm. (y) Two notes may be made on the fore-arm. In this there are two bones, the ulna on the little finger side, the radius on the thumb side. Only the former of these enters into the elbow-joint. The upper end of the ulna presents a cavity, the sigmoid, into which the inner condyle of the humerus fits ; crtyfia (sigma) is the Greek S and ttSos (eidos) = like­ ness. Behind, and overhanging this cavity is the olecranon • tnX'rjV'qs-Kpa.vov (olenes-kranon) = elbow’s point. This process, when the elbow is straightened, fits into » depression in the back and lower part of the humerus. In all the lower animals, even up to the Oynomorpha, this olecranon process extends further up than, and beyond, the sigmoid cavity. In the Anthropomorpha and in Man th? olecranon process is not extended upwards beyond the cavity. We are able to turn the haud over so that the back lies upwards. This movement is that of pronation, as the hand then lies prone. The converse movement is that of supina­ tion, when the hand is made to lie palm upwards—supine. All the Primates have this power of turning the radius round the ulna. In the lower members of the order the power is greatly reduced, whilst in the higher forms it “ almost equals that enjoyed by Man” (Flowers’ “Osteology of the Mammalia,” p. 245.) (8) The carpus, or wrist. This part of the limb in us consists of eight bones, in two rows of four each. The lower mem­ bers of our order Primates have nine bones in the carpus ; an additional one, the os centrale (central bone) is present. The Lemur has nine ; so have the marmoset, the Platyrrhini, the Cynomorpha, the Gibbon and the Orang. But in the Ohim- �*4 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. pani-^e and Gorilla the os centrale is wanting, the number of wrist bones, is eight, and the human arrangement obtains. In the maprity of the Primates both the bones of the fore-arm, the radius and ulna, are in direct articulation with the wrist-bones. Now, in Man, • this is not the case. Our carpus articulates with the radius only ; the ulna does not joint on to any of the wrist-bones. This human arrange­ ment is met with in two of the anthropoid apes. The Gorilla and Orang have their carpus connected directly with the radius alone. (e) The last thing to be considered in connection with the upper extremity is the hand, or manus. In this the two main points are the nails, or claws, on the digits and the nature of the pollex or thumb. In most Mammalia the digits are provided with claws rather than nails. This is also the case in the lower Primates. Thus the Cheiromyini have claws on every digit of the hand, although that on the pollex is modified in the direction of a nail. The Lemuridae and the marmoset present the same arrangement. The pollex-daw becomes in the Cynomorpha yet more flattened and nail-like, but it is not until the anthropoids are reached that a clear and distinct nail is encountered. In the Gibbon this nail is confined to the pollex; all the other four digits have claws. But in the three higher Anthropomorpha nails are seen on each of the hand digits, as in Man. As to the pollex itself. This digit is not capable of opposition to the other digits in many of the Lemuridae nor in the marmoset. In this last also the power of moving the thumb is not well marked. Nor is the pollex truly opposable in the Platyrrhini, though its power of movement is very notable. In this group the thumb is not nearly so dis­ tinctly different from the rest of the digits as it is in the rest of the Catarrhini. Indeed the pollex of Ateles is quite rudimentary' and functionless, although all the muscle* necessary for its movement are present. I pass, to the consideration of the lower extremity. Her*, as with the upper, the arch and the limb will be studied. 1. The arch. In this case there is only one large and complex bone on each side, the hip-bone. It is so oddly shaped that even the ingenuity of anatomists failed to find • likeness for it. Hence its name os innominatum (nameles* �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 25 %one). The two ossa innominata make with the sacrum the pelvis or basin. The length and breadth of the pelvis in ■different Primates give some interesting transitions. If we look at the skeleton of any quadruped, such as the dog, or •even at the living animal, we see that the pelvis is long and narrow. But that of a human being is relatively much shorter and broader. • A convenient phrase is used in the study of pelves. Pelvic index. Suppose that the length of the pelvis of any particular animal is multiplied by the •number 100 and divided by the breadth of the same pelvis, the result will be a number greater than 100, or 100, or a num­ ber less than 100 according as the pelvis is longer than broad, as long as it is broad or shorter than it is broad. The number resulting from dividing the length X 100 by the breadth is called the pelvic index for the particular animal. This number will be less the higher the position of the animal in the scale of Mammalia. The following list is that of the pelvic indices of some of ■the higher Primates. In every case the female pelvis is taken ................ 141 Chimpanzee ... 128 Gorilla ... ... 116 Australian 103 •*• Bush woman 100 • •• Eskimo ... 93 ••• Hindu ... ... 91 Peruvian 78 ... European From this list we see that the pelvis of the Chimpanzee is rft little less than half as long again as it is broad ; that the pelvis of the Gorilla is rather more than one-fourth as long . again as it is broad; that two of the low human races have .pelves longer than they are broad; that the pelvis of the "Eskimo woman is as broad as it is long; that in the higher .human races the pelvis is broader than long. In our present ;fitudy the most important thing to be noted is that there is -a much greater difference of pelvic index between man and man than between ape and man. 116 (Australian) — 78 *(European)=38. But 128 (Gorilla) — 116 (Australian)^ •only 12. The difference is even greater between two cul- �26 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. tured human races than between the Gorilla and the Aus­ tralian and than between two anthropoid apes. 93 (Hindu) — 78 (European) = 15. 128 — 116 = only 12. 141 (Chim­ panzee)—128 (Gorilla) =13. 2. The hallux, or great toe, is the only other part of the lower limb we need notice. Its length, in relation to the length of the foot, shortens as we ascend in the order Primates. Thehallux is more than the length of the foot in Hylobates and Troglodytes (the Gibbon and the Orang)—is in fact nearly half as long as the whole foot. In the Gorilla, the fraction is less than ; in the Orang about or £; in Man it is about | or (-j^-). The hallux follows much the same line as the pollex as to its power of movement and the nature of its claw or nail. In the Cheiromys, e.g., the hallux is the only one of the foot-digitsthat has a nail; all the rest are furnished with clavrs. In. this genus, as in the Lemurini, the great toe is large and op­ posable to the others. But in all the Simiadse this part issmaller than the second digit, though it is capable of con­ siderable movement. In the Gibbon the nail is only to beseen on the hallux ; all the other four digits have claws. But. in the three higher Anthropomorpha, nails are seen on each, of the foot-digits, as in Man. JU. The Skull.—I have said that in considering this part of the skeleton it is customary to take the head and the faceas two regions of the skull (p. 17). (1) The head.—First let us look at the relative lengths of the bony base of the cranium, and of the cavity in which the brain is lodged. If the skull of any Primate is examined from below, we see that its base presents a large hole, the foramen magnum, through which the spinal cord runs up into the brain. In front of this hole lies a bony mass, entering into the floor of the brain cavity. This is called the basi-oranial axis. If, as in man, the foramen magnum is large, and situate in thebase of the skull, and not quite at the most posterior part of that, it is evident that the length of the brain cavity will be more than that of this basi-cranial axis. But if the foramenis not large, and if it is situated at the very back of the base of the skull, or even, as in some cases, in the back ratherthan the base of that organ, it is evident that the length of the basi-cranial axis will be more nearly equal or even quite- �MONKEYS, APES, MEM. 27 equal to that of the brain cavity. Roughly epeaking, the relations between these two lengths in different animals give some indication of the cerebral capacities of the different animals. I shall represent the length of the bony basi-cranial axis in each case by 100. In that case we have the following table :— Basi-cranial axis ... ... = 100 Brain cavity in some Lemuridae, Arctopithecini, Platyrrhini (Squirrel Monkey) ... = less than 100 Other Platyrrhini ... ... =100 Cynomorpha (howling monkey) = 150 (not more than) Anthropomorpha ... ... =170 Man ............................ = 230—270 Up to the Platyrrhini, therefore, the basi-cranial axis is longer than, or as long as, the brain cavity. In all of the Simiadaa it is more than half as long. In Man it is less than half as long. Here we must bear in mind that these measurements have not been made, as far as I am able to ascertain, on any of the microcephalous skulls. Even without taking these into account, however, there is more difference between the 100 of the platyrrhine monkeys and the 170 of the anthropoid apes than between the 170 of the latter and the 230 of the low human races. Into the base of the skull, forming part of that bony basi­ cranial axis just considered, enters part of a very complex bone known as the sphenoid; (sphen) = a wedge. The sphenoid is wedged in between the frontal in front, the occipital behind, the parietals and temporals at the sides. This apparently single bone in the adult human skull i3 really made up of several bones conjoined (8 in all). We, however, are only concerned with so much of the sphenoid as enters into the floor of the skull. Even this portion consists of two parts. These, from behind forwards, are the basisphenoid and the pre-sphenoid. In the human skull thesetwo parts are from a very early age so completely united that no trace of the suture or seam or line of jointure is visible. When we turn to the skulls of the lower Primates we find that in all of them up to the Cynomorpha this suture between the basi-sphenoid behind and the pre-sphenoid in front is quits �28 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. ■distinct until the animal is nearly full grown. On the other hand, the skulls of the Anthropomorpha show no trace of the line of junction, and the basi-sphenoid and pre-sphenoid are in these animals quite united, so as io form one bone, ere the milk-teeth are shed. That is, once again, the characteristic of the human skull appears in the apes first. The relation of the frontal bone to the ethmoid may be taken next. In all the Primates the frontal or forehead bone is originally two bones, a right and a left. Each of these bones forms not only one half of that which is generally known as the forehead but also the roof of the orbit or eye-cavity. Between the two orbital roofs is a considerable cleft. In this -cleft lies the ethmoid or sieve-bone ; TfOfLos (ethmos) = a sieve. This bone might be also called the nose-bone. For it is, as we might gather from its position, in intimate relation to the nose. The upper part of it on each side forms the roof of the nasal cavity, and is pierced with holes, through which run the branches of the olfactory nerve. Hence its name of sieve-like. In us the orbital plates of the right and left frontal bones join on to the ethmoid that lies between them at the side of the ethmoid. They do not extend at all behind that bone. But in all the rest of the Primates, save one, these two roofs of the two orbits not only join the ■ethmoid at its sides; they extend behind it and join one another. There is a post-ethmoidal union of the two frontals. This anatomical distinction holds between the skull of Man and the majority of |;he Primates. But even this is not an absolute distinction. For in one of the anthropoid apes, viz., the Orang, the two orbit roofs do not run posteriorly to the ethmoidal and conjoin. There is in the Orang, as in Man, no post-ethmoidal union of the two frontals. Still dealing with the interior of the skull, we have to do with an interesting marking on one of the bones of the Primate skull that corresponds with a certain part of the brain. That part is the flocculus (a little lock of wool) of the ■cerebellum. The cerebellum, or little or hind-brain, has in the Primates a central lobe, the vermis (or worm) cerebelli, ■and two side lobes. From each of these side lobes projects in some Mammalia and in most of the Primates an irregularlyahaped extension of brain substance called the flocculus: This ■rests on the bone in which the ear is lodged, part of the �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 29 temporal of human, the periotic of comparative anatomy; treat (peri)-= around ; ov$, otos (ous, otos) = the ear. As a consequence, the surface of the periotic that enters into the internal wall of the skull- has a depression or fossa (a ditch), corresponding with the flocculus. This fossa iswell~ marked in the Lemuridse, Arctopithecini and Platyrrhini, in all of whom the flocculus is large. The fossa is but faintly marked in the skull of the Cynomorpha, and in that of the Anthropomorpha it is nearly obliterated. Certainly in these the depression on the periotic bone is no more notice­ able than it is in the skull of Man. And this goes hand in hand with the fact that neither the human nor the higher Simian brain has any flocculi attached to the cerebellum, whilst the presence in the human and higher Simian skull of traces of the depression is evidence that the anthropoids and Man are alike the offspring through evolution of common progenitors in whose brain the flocculi were present. The complex temporal bone of the human skull furnishes us with one more instance of transition. This bone, like the sphenoid, in reality consists of many bones. Of these we need only discuss one—the tympanic. Tympanum— the drum (of the ear). The temporal bone has in Man a passage some 1^ inch long, leading in from the external ear and closed at its inner end by the drum of the ear. This passage, the external auditory meatus, is formed by the elongation of the bone known as the tympanic. This is, at first, a simple ring of osseous matter, that is to be filled up, as it were, by the membrana tympani, or drum. In this primal arrangement there is no meatus, and the drum of the ear is, as in the Frog, practically flush with the surface of the skull. Now, this primal arrangement in the human being remains permanent in all the Primates up to the Platyrrhini. In these the tym­ panic bone is ring-like, and the meatus is very short or non­ existent. But in all the Oatarrhini, the change to the human condition has occurred. The ring-like tympanic bone elongatesoutwards, and becomes a lengthy, bony tube, whose canal is the external auditory meatus. And this is what takes place in Man. (2) The Face.—Ths chief interest in connexion with the bones of the face and their relative arrangement centres in. the facial angle. This is a measurement that we owe to thw �0 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. Dutch ethnologist, Peter Camper (born at Leyden, 1722, died at the Hague, 1799). His idea was, by means of this angle, to indicate the degree of projection of the face in different races of men, and the relative development of tn.e face as compared with that of the head. In the lower Mammalia, as the Dog, e.g., the face projects greatly from the head— there is, in short/ a muzzle. In the lower Primates also the face is developed in relation to the head to a greater extent than in the higher. For the purpose of comparison, Camper suggested the drawing of two lines on the skull. One was to descend from the most prominent part of the frontal or forehead bone until it reached the margin of the upper jaw, where the incisors are inserted. The other was to run approximately in a hori­ zontal direction through the middle of the opening of the external auditory canal to the point of junction of the nasal bone of the side observed with the frontal. These two lines will include an angle, and the angle will evidently be the greater, the smaller the face is relatively to the head and the higher the type of Primate intellectually. The following is a table of certain facial angles as measured on the skulls of ■certain Primates :— Facial Angles 20° Gibbon ... 30° Chimpanzee ... . ... 30°-35° Orang ... 35°-47° Gorilla ... ... 56°-60° Young Anthropomorpha 64° Namakas 65° Callithrix sciurea 67° Negroes ... Low Europeans) 70° “ Australians J 75° Kalmuks ... . 80° European (average) 90° Antique statues . This list is worth studying. Notice first that the young Anthropomorpha have a facial angle larger than that possessed by the adult apes. The moral of this is obvious. The old law of phylogeny and ontogeny comes in again. Ths �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 3) life-history of the individual is an epitome of ti. 't of the race. The ontogeny is a brief phylogeny. The anthropoids in their development reach a certain phase -of evolution. * The same phase is reached by the developing man. But having reached this phase, represented, as far as concerns the facia1 angle, by 56°—60° in the above table, the anthropoids recede. Man, having reached the same phase, advances. These are two ontogenetical facts. Their phylogenetic equivalent is, probably, that the Simian ancestor of the Anthropomorpha and of the Anthropidae varied in two directions. Having reached the phase represented, as far as concerns the facial angle, by 56°—60° the ancestor varied in two directions, that •of the anthropoids with their adult facial angle from 20° to 47°, and that of Man with the adult facial angle, from 70° to 90°. Another point. Take the difference - numbers. 47° (Gorilla)-20° (Gibbon) = 27°. 64° (Namakas^ - 47° (Go­ rilla) = 17°. A greater difference between ape and ape than between ape and man. This result we obtain without taking into consideration the young Anthropomorpha, and without taking into consideration the curious case of Callithrix sciurea. This last is one of the squirrel-monkey species of Brazil. Its facial angle is actually at least as great as that of the Namakas or Hottentot inhabitants of Great Namakaland in South Africa. The country of the Namakas as the ’Europeans call these people, is limited by the Walvisch Bay northwards (23° S. lat.), the mouth of the Orange River southwards (28° 30' S. lat.), the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Kalahari •desert to the east. In view of the similarity of facial angle in the platyrrhine Callithrix and this Homo hottentotus, it is interesting to note that the former is inoffensive, intelligent and easily and thoroughly tamed, whilst the latter “ possess every vice of savages and none of their nobler qualities ” (Anderson). The Kalmuks are a Mongol race (Homo mongolus), partly Chinese, partly Russian subjects, ranging from the steppes of the Don and Volga to the deserts and mountain ranges of Upper Asia. They are a nomadic, warlike, Buddhist race. Observe also, in the table, the steady gradation from 64° in the low men up to 90° in the statues. These last are of moment. They—representations of the gods or of demi­ �32 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. gods, or, at lowest, of very lofty men and women—have a. facial angle 10° greater than that of the European of to-day. And this is at least in part due to the fact that the ideal ist always higher than the real. This part of our subject will be concluded by a study of two tables in which are incorporated the results of certain, measurements on the skulls of certain microcephali or apemen. As this chapter closes, and the next ' will be in part occupied, with notes on these, let us begin by understanding what the microcephali are. In different countries, probably in different centuries, human parents, in many cases quite normal, have produced as offspring beings of an abnormal type. Often covered as to a large part of their bodies with hair; unable to walk erect until long after the usual time when the human child has ceased to crawl on all-fours ; in­ capable of speech; unteachable; with receding foreheads that cover brains whose capacity and weight are inferior to the capacity and weight of the brains of the anthropoid apes—these animals, bom of human parents, are of the ape structure. Their technical name is microcephali: juicpog (mikros) = small, kcOoXt) (kephale) = head. I shall follow Carl Vogt, and call them ape-men.Of the many cases on record, and even of the smaller number of these that have received careful scientific investi­ gation, I shall only deal with ten observed and described in. Germany. Here is a list of them : Country. Name. 1. Germany ... Gottfried Mcehre ... 2. ... Michel Sohn... ... ... Frederic Sohn 3. 4. ... Conrad Schuttelndreyer 99 5. ... Of Jena 99 6. ... Ludwig Racke ... 99 7. ... Margaret Maehler ... 99 8. ... Jean Moegle ... ... 99 9. ... Jacques Moegle ... 99 10. ... Jean Georges Moegle 99 Age. • •• ••• • •• ••• • •• 44 20 18 31 26 20 33 15 10 5 The results of two sets of measurements made upon the kulls of the ape-man and a comparison with the results of �35 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. similar measurements made on the Chimpanzee and the Negro . and the average European skull follow,: Skull Measurements. Front of mouth to foramen magnutii. Schuttelndreyer ... ... Maehler ........................... Of Jena ... ... ... Moehre ... ... ... Frederic Sohn ... ... Eacke ............................ Michel Sohn ............... Chimpanzee ... ... Negro ... ... 18’5 20 21’5 25’2 25’8 29-5 30-9 32’5 45*4 Base of skull. ....... 20 21.4 23 29 27’7 30-1 32-6 37’1 49 ....... ....... ....... The foramen magnum is the large hole in the base of the situll through which the spinal cord passes to enter the brain that lies within the cranium. This foramen lies far back in the skull. The first series of numbers gives the proportional distances in the various skulls from the very front of the inouth, from the most prominent part of the upper jaw, to the front edge of the foramen magnum. The second series gives the proportional numbers that represent the whole length of the base of the skull from the most prominent part of the upper jaw to the hinder border of the foramen. The difference between each pair of numbers on the same line will give the proportional length of the foramen in the skull considered. As the foramen is generally about the same length in the different microcephalous skulls, the first seven pairs of numbers run approximately parallel. But in the chimpanzee and negro the length of the foramen from front to back is considerably greater than in the ape-men. Notice that the length of the skull in the anthropoid ape is intermediate between its length in the negro and in the microcephali. Also that in the latter the foramen is placed farther back in the skull than in the chimpanzee. The apemen, in a word, are farther from the human type in this respect than is the chimpanzee. C �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. Auditory opening to naso-frontcd suture — 100. Of Jena ... Chimpanzee ... Maehler Frederic Sohn Schuttelndreyer ... Pongo Maehre ... Racke ... Case of Sandifort Michel Sohn Average Skull ... Occipital Curve to Auditory Opening. 631 .. 63-3 .. 65-9 .. 72-3 .. 74-7 .. 80-0 •• 81-4 82-6 .. 85-5 ... 88-9 .. •• . 93-103 auditory opening is the aperture of the ear. naso-frontal suture is the line of junction between the nasal bone of one side and the frontal. This suture, or seam, is just above the place on which a pince-nez rests, and is between the upper parts of the two orbits. In the table just given the length from this suture to the middle of the auditory opening is taken as 100. The occipital curve is the strongly-marked ridge on the back part of the posterior bone of the head, the middle point of which is the prominence at the back of the head, which, like the darkness in Egypt, may be felt, if it is not covered by artificial hair or by head-gear. The numbers given express the relations of the distances from the middle of the auditory opening to this prominence of the occipital ridge. Clearly, the higher the number in this list the greater the length of the posterior region of the skull. The interesting point, however, is in the succession of the skulls. The microcephalus of Jena comes lowest in the fist. His num­ ber, 63'1, is nearly identical with that of the chimpanzee. Then follow three more ape-men, and then a pongo or gorilla from the Berlin museum. Four more ape-men’s names inter­ vene between the case of the anthropoid ape and the men of average brain-power. Thus we have, as far as this measure­ ment is concerned, two anthropoid apes interpolated amongst the ape-men. �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. CHAPTER 35 IV. D.—The Brain. This last chapter will be devoted to the consideration of the ■organ that presents most difficulty to the anti-evolutionist. In spite of the fact that brain-evolution has been the line along which especially, Man has evolved from the bruteancestor common to him and the anthropoids, nevertheless ■our general thesis can be maintained in respect to this organ as to all others. The evidence now to be given will once more show that there is more difference betwen ape and ape and between man and man than between ape and man. First, certain terms will be explained. Then the brain•charact eristics of the Primates generally will be given, and the brains of those members of the order lower than the man-like apes will be briefly considered. After that the brains of the Anthropomorpha and Man will be studied. I. Terms.—With the brain as with the skeleton, he that has already mastered the requisite anatomical details, or even he that can follow that which is to come, on the actual brain or even on a picture, will be better off than the average reader of these lines. None the less, I believe a person of ordinary intelligence will be able to understand all the facts to be pre•sently given, if he reads carefully the next few paragraphs. The spinal cord of the Primates, passing through the foramen magnum in the base of the skull, expands into th brain or encephalon. This organ presents three chief regions' with which alone we are concerned. They are the brain proper or cerebrum, covering over in Man all the rest of the ence* phalon ; the ganglia or swellings at the base of the cerebrum ; the cerebellum, little or after-brain, lying under the posterior part of the cerebrum. (a) Cerebrum.—This, by far the largest part of the ence­ phalon, has two hemispheres, lying right and left. Each of these presents fissures, lobes, convolutions, all on the exterior, and within cavities. 1. TheFissures.—In addition to the one longitudinal, median, deep fissure separating the right half of the brain from the left, the following fissures are to be seen in each hemisphere, {a) The fissure of Sylvius.—This runs from a point in the base of the brain about £ of the length from the anterior encL �36 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. upwards and backwards. Thus it marks off a part of .th® brain that lies behind and below it (the temporal lobe)from a larger part lying in front of and above it. (/?) The fissure of Rolando. This divides the larger part lying in front of and above the fissure of Sylvius into two parts. Running nearly vertically from above downwards, this fissure marks off the frontal lobe before the fissure from the parietal lobe behind it. (y) Internal perpendicular fissure.—This can only be seen on the inner face of each hemisphere. If the hemispheres are forcibly separated, and the inner face of one of them is observed, a fissure is seen towards the posterior part of that face that runs vertically and marks off a small posterior lobe, the occipital, from the parietal in front. There is another fissure, but the three just described are all that enter into our present calculations. 2. Lobes.—These have just been. described in the main. Named after the bones of the head for the most part, they are on each side: a. the frontal, bounded posteriorly by the fissure of Rolando ; y3. the parietal, bounded anteriorly by the fissure of Rolando, inferiorly and posteriorly to some' extent by that of Sylvius, whilst at its upper posterior portion it glides on the outer aspect of the brain into the occipital lobe, without any very clear line of demarcation ; y. the tem­ poral, bounded in front and above by the fissure of Sylvius, And also gliding posteriorly into the occipital as far as the outer aspect of the brain is concerned ; 8. the occipital, at the back of the cerebral hemisphere, marked off on the internal face from the parietal by the internal perpendicular fissure ; e. the central lobe or island of Reil, which lies deeply placed at the bottom of the fissure of Sylvius. 3. Convolutions.—The external surface of each cerebral hemisphere exhibits certain convolutions or folds, separated by sulci or furrows. Most of the convolutions vzith which we shall have to do need only be designated by the name of the particular lobe to which they belong.' But one or two that are of importance in evolution must be mentioned. The two eonvolutions-that bound the fissure of Rolando are called the ascending frontal (in front of the fissure) and the ascending parietal (behind the fissure). The supra-marginal convolu­ tion is also of much moment. It is the convolution whose presence so eminent a man as Gratiolet held as peculiar to �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 37 'tne human brain. This convolution or lobule lies above the upper and posterior end of the Sylvian fissure, and belongs ■therefore to the parietal lobe. In man and in some of his .allies the main convolutions are connected hy small pieces of nervous tissue at certain parts of the brain. These connecting pieces are called the bridging-over or annectent convolutions ; •annccto — I tie on. 4. Cavities.—Within the cerebra1 hemispheres are two •cavities, one on each side, called the lateral ventricles. Latus, lateris — side. Ventricle is a name used in anatomy for a ■cavity. These two ventricles, with other cavities within the brain, are the remains of the primitive groove that first appears in the embryo mammal at what will be the dorsal region. Each lateral ventricle extends forwards, downwards and backwards. The forward extension (anterior cornu or horn) runs into the frontal lobe. The downward extension ((middle cornu) runs into the temporal lobe. The backward extension (posterior cornu) runs into the occipital. The -central part or “ body ” of the cavity corresponds with the parietal lobe. (6) Brain-ganglia.—These are certain masses of nerve ■tissue distinct from, and covered over by, the cerebral hemi•spheres. The only ones with which the reader need b<* troubled are the hippocampi, the corpora striata, optie thalams •corpora albicantia, olfactory lobes. In the middle or descending cornu is a swelling of the merve tissue, known, from its peculiar shape, as the hippo­ campus major ; in the posterior cornu is a similar swelling, the hippocampus minor. Finally, within the “ body ” of the ventricle are two swellings of nerve-matter known as the •corpus striatum (striped body), the anterior, and the optic ■thalamus (bed), the posterior. The corpora albicantia (whitish bodies) are two round, white nervous masses, visible, without any dissection, about the middle of the base of the brain; whilst the olfactory lobes are two ganglia connected with the sense of smell, lying below the frontal lobes and above the nose cavities. (c) The cerebellum is the little hind brain already men­ tioned (p. 35). II. The brain of Primates generally.—The distinctive cha* iracters of the Primate brain by which it is marked off �88 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. anatomically from that of other mammalian orders are a» follows a. Transverse pattern of convolutions. The arrange­ ment of the convolutions of the cerebrum is not of the oblique, slanting order, as in the horse. Nor are they arranged, lengthwise, as in the dog. Their main direction is transverse to the longitudinal axis of the brain, b. No corpora trapezoidea, or trapezium-shaped nerve-masses, in connectionwith the medulla oblongata or swollen top of the spinal cord as that part joins the encephalon, c. Two corpora albicantia (p. 37) in place of the single central body that represents these in the lower mammals, d. An occipital lobe (p. 36). e. Without additional external nervous-tissue growths from, the under surface of the temporal lobe, f Olfactory lobesnever reaching sufficiently far back to run across the fissureof Sylvius, g. A central lobe or island of Beil. h. The lateral ventricle not extending into the olfactory lobe, but extending into the occipital and presenting in the posterior­ cornu that passes into the occipital lobe a swelling, the hippo­ campus minor. HI. Lemuridae to Cynomorpha.—The eight characters just given are those that serve to distinguish the Primate brain from that of other Mammalia. A note or two on the brainsof the members of the order below the Gibbon follow. Lemuridae.—Whilst these lowest Primates exhibit all themarks just given, the low nature of their brain is shown by (a) the projection of the olfactory lobes in front of, and thecerebellum behind, the cerebral hemispheres; these last are not sufficiently developed to cover completely, as they do in man, the olfactory lobes and the cerebellum ; (ft) the occipital lobe with its contained posterior cornu and hippocampus­ minor is rudimentary ; (c) the cerebral hemispheres are quite smooth, or with the merest trace of incipient convolutions (d) the fissure of Sylvius, between the parietal and temporal lobes, is the only one ever present, and if this appears, itjs only a mere trace. Marmoset.—Here the cerebellum is covered by the cerebral hemispheres, although the olfactory lobes are still exposed ; the occipital lobe has, in fact grown larger; the cerebellum isnearly smooth, but not quite without convolutions; theSylvian fissure is larger than in the Lemuridse, and a trace of the fissure of Eolando, between the frontal and parietal lobes,. �r MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 39 is now visible. The central lobe, or island of Beil, is wanting. In the Platyrrhini there is a further advance. The cere­ bellum. and olfactory lobes are generally both covered, and although in the Howler monkey the cerebral hemispheres are nearly smooth and the occipital lobe is small, yet many of the convolutions that are seen in the human cerebrum- are now present as well as the third of the chief fissures, the perpendicular, marking off the occipital lobe. The Cyno­ morpha have all the chief sulci and folds of the frontal and parietal lobes and the commencement of the occipital con­ volutions. The frontal lobes are also rounder and less pointed than in the Platyrrhini. IV. We pass to the last and the most important part of this discussion. That is the comparison of the brains of the anthropoid apes and Man. This subject will be dealt with under the following heads: the size and weight of the brain, its shape, the number and arrangement of its fissures and the nature of the convolutions. (a) Size and weight.—These have been already discussed at some length in “The Origin of Man,” pp. 10, 11. But a few more facts supplementary to those given there may be noted. Upon the weight question little need be added to that which has already been said. But as to volume much must be said. And first, concerning the weight of the brain. Its ratio to the weight of the body should be mentioned. Amongst the anthropoid apes this ratio is least in the lowest of them, the Gibbon. But I cannot find any numbers expressing that ratio exactly in either the Gibbon or the Gorilla. We have, however, the numbers for the Orang, the Chimpanzee and Man. In the Orang examined by the late Professor Bolleston the body was about 22'3 times as heavy as the brain. In the Chimpanzee examined by Professor Marshall the body was about 19 times as heavy as the brain. In Man the average ratio of body weight to brain weight is 36 to 1. All the three numbers are more favorable to the Primates as regards brain development than those of most other animals. Thus the average ratios of body to brain weight are in the class Mammalia 186 to 1, in birds 212 to 1, in reptiles 1321 to 1, in fishes 5,628 to 1. We must not, however, lay undue stress upon these numbers, as in some �10 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. rfmall Vertebrata the kindred ratios are higher than even In the Primates. Thus in the field-mouse 31 to 1 is the pro­ portion; in the goldfinch 24 to 1 ; in the blue-headed tit 12 to 1. Nevertheless the fact is interesting that in at least two of the Anthropomorpha the brain is relatively to the body of a greater weight than it is in Man. In the measurements that are now to be given, I again follow the plan adopted once or twice before, and compare some of the lowest forms of men with the man-like apes. The two comparisons that are now to be instituted are in respect to brain-surface and to brain-volume. Total Jacques Moegle ... Maehler Child ............... Chimpanzee Schuttelndreyer ... Racke Negro White Chimpanzee ............... ............... ............... ............... ............... ... ... ... ... 33 Microcephali (average) White ... 7,813 sq. m. m. 8,014 9,040 9,300 9,399 14,-182 24,705 „ 2o,15o ,, 4 4*G 100 This table shows the actual extent of surface of the cerebral hemispheres.. It will be observed that the normal European brain has a surface of about 25,000 square millimetres (1 sq. m. m. = about of a square inch). The surface of the negro brain is not very much less in extent. There is a difference of more than 10,000 sq. m. m. between the negro and Ludwig Racek, the ape-man, in this particular measure­ ment, and Racke is 5,00b sq. m. m. in advance of any other observed ape-man. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that Racke was an epileptic, and in cases of epilepsy, the brain is often of unusually large size, though its greater mass is probably due, not to increase in the quantity of true brain tissue, but to growth of an inferior kind of material. Another noticeable thing is that the surface of the child’s brain is very much less in extent than that of the adult, although, as we know, the volume and mass of the two brains �41 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. -do not greatly differ. The advance is in complexity rather than in size. From our present point of view, however, the most inter­ esting number is the 9,300 sq. m. m. of the Chimpanzee. This ii umber is intercalated amongst those that refer to the brains of the ape-men. The relative positions of the adult human being, the anthropoid ape, and the abnormal man, are well shown by the three numbers given at the end of this table. Taking 100 as representing the total brain-surface of the white a-ace, 44-6 represents the average of the total brain-surface in such microcephali as have been examined, and 33 the brain­ surface of an average anthropoid ape. The difference number (100 — 44-6 = 5o-4) between the two kinds of men is nearly five times as great as the difference number (44-6 — 33= 11-6) between the lower man and the ape. Parisians, 19th cent wry Parisians, 1,300 cubic centim. 1,500 99' 1,700 99 1,900 99 Ancient Egyptians to to to to Negroes 1,200 1,300 1,500 1,700 A ustralians Brain Capacityj 12th century Brain Capacity. 45-0 45-0 10-0 0-0 100 7-4 68-6 24-0 0-0 100 0-0 54-6 45-4 0-0 100 0-0 44-8 50-7 4-5 100 0-0 24-7 63-6 11-7 100 MicrocephAli. Country. Name. Age. Brain Capacity. 1 Germany ...Gottfried Maehre ... 44 ... 555 ...Michel Sohn 2 20 ... 370 99 3 ...Frederic Sohn 18 ... 460 99 4 ...Conrad Shuttelndreyer 31 ... 370 99 5 ...Of Jena ... 26 ... 350 99 6 ...Ludwig Racke 20 ... 622 99 7 ...Marguerite Msehler 33 ... 296 99 8 ...Jean Moegle 15 ... 395 H 9 ...Jacques Moegle ... 10 ... 272 99 10 ...Jean Georges Moegle 5 ... 480 99 �42 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. Of all measurements, those given in the last table are of themost importance. But I have in this table placed before thenumbere that represent the brain capacity of ten of the micro­ cephali the results of the observations of Paul Broca upon a. number of skulls of different races. This is for the purposeof comparison. Broca’s numbers call for comment in some little detail. The great French anthropologist had the opportunity of examining a large number of skulls that were unearthed from, cemeteries in Paris, and from beneath a house whose building certainly dated back to the time of Philip Augustus. Theseare classed in the above table as Parisians Of the twelfth cen­ tury. As the type of race advances the cranial capacity advances. Between 1,200 and 1,300 c. c. are only found skullsof the two lowest races—the Australians and Negroes. Between. 1,300 and 1,500 c. c. are nearly one half the Australians and twelfth-century Parisians, more than one half the Negroesand Egyptians, and less than one-fourth of the most recent type. Between 1,500 and 1,700 c. c. come one-tenth of theAustralians (and all of these really are below 1,600 c. c.), about one-fourth of the Negroes, nearly one half of the Egyp­ tians, about one half of the earlier Parisians, and considerably more than one half of the Parisians of to-day, Only theParisian skulls exceed in capacity 1,700 c. c., and more than twice as many per cent, of the modern men pass this limit as; compared with their ancestors of six centuries ago. Even in these cases of normal human beings our former generalisation holds. The Gorilla’s cranial capacity is often as much as 600 c. c. The difference between this number and 1,200 c. c. = 600 c. c. But the difference between 1,200. c. c. (Australian) and 1,900 c. c. (European) =700 c. c. That the gap is between the different members of the human­ race rather than between these and the anthropoid apes, is shown yet more clearly in the second part of the table, wherethe cranial capacities of some of the microcephali are recorded. With the exception of Ludwig Racke, everyone of these beings, born of human parents, had a capacity less than that of theape.nge Gorilla ; and in one case, that- of the adult woman,. Mar. uerite Maehler, less than one half that of the anthropoid, era. �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 43 The case of Backe has already been noted as exceptionalBut placing him on one side, we have the startling fact that normal human parents have given birth to offspring whose brain capacities are far below those of man’s nearest allies. The difference between the 296 of Marguerite Maehler and the 1,900 of some modern Parisians is over 1,600 c. c. And yet both these are members of the human race. (b) Shape.—The human brain is, to use a common-placephrase, almost as broad as it is long, becoming in some cases nearly of a circular outline. On the other hand, the brains of the lower Primates are relatively longer than broad. Those of the Anthropomorpha, as usual, present characters more nearly allied to the human than to those of the catarrhine brain, for example, and, indeed, in some cases actually overlap, as it were, the human brain. The Chim­ panzee has a brain ovoid (or eggdike) in shape but rather short and broad. The Gorilla’s brain is less ovoid than that of the Chimpanzee, and is relatively broader than that of any other anthropoid. The Orang, whilst differing in certain particulars from Man more than its and his allies, approaches him in others. The beak-like frontal lobes make the outlineof the Orang brain much less human in aspect than are theoutlines of those of the other two apes. The overlapping mentioned .above is illustrated by the account given by Marshall [“Philosophical Transactions,” 1884] of the braim of a Bushwoman dissected by him. Its shape was “ longnarrow, ovoid.” But in one very important point the Orang ranks highest. That is in the want of symmetry of the two halves of its biain. The convolutions of the right and left hemispheres respectively do not correspond exactly. This is also the case­ in a yet more marked degree in the brain of Man. Here thesymmetry is more noticeable than in any of the Anthropo­ morpha, in all of whom it is to be seen ; even more noticeable than in the Orang, whose brain exhibits this characteristic most clearly as far as the anthropoids are concerned. Is there any reason for this want of correspondence in the arrangement of the brain-folds in the higher Primates ? The suggestion of Bastian [“ Brain as an Organ of Mind,” p. 410] is that it is connected with a functional inequality betweenthe two hemispheres. The suggestion is a luminous one �44 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. Perhaps it may be supplemented by another, upon which a jjassage from Haeckel may throw light. “ That the human pinna (external ear) is a rudimentary organ is demonstrated by the extraordinary variations in its size and shape.” The better way, possibly, to put it is that the sense of hearing is at the present time undergoing much modiflbation. Variations in its functional activity are very frequent and diverse. There* are contending schools of music, and the general ear is slowly being educated to the appreciation of finer tones, more complex successions, and more subtle harmonies. As the function of hearing is under­ going variation and evolution, the organ of hearing (not alone on the exterior, but internally) is varying, and diversities of form appear in individuals, and even on the opposite sides of the same head. The application of this to the asymmetry of the brains of the highest Primates is obvious. As was said a little further back, these have evolved along the line of brain development, and one at least of them, Man, is yet marching on. As the function is varying the organ ought to be found to be variable. And this is the case not only on opposite sides of the same brain, but in different individuals, just as it was with the ear. I quote Rolleston’s words as to a particular part of the brain in support of this proposition. The words are true generally. “ In the higher species of the . . . Apes, as in the higher varities of the species Man, we find variability the rule, uniformity-the exception; in the lower species, as in the lower varieties of Man, the reverse conditions obtain.” Nor can I leave this interesting subject without reminding the reader that not only is there in all the anthropoids this ; symmetry, but that in the lower human races it is little, if i.t all, better marked than in the Anthropomorpha, and that it is most marked in the most civilised races and in the most ■cultured individuals. (c) Fissures.—Let me again remind the reader of the names and positions of these. Neglecting the longitudinal that separates the two hemispheres, the brain of all the highest Primates presents on each side, the fissure of Sylvius running backwards and upwards between the parietal and temporal lobes, that of Rolando running nearly vertically between the tfror.tal and parietal lobe; that known as the internal per­ �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 45 pendicular, running vertically on tlie inner aspect of each hemisphere, where the hemisphere is in contact with its fellow, and separating the parietal and occipital lobes. It may bestated here that, corresponding with this last, an external fissure is in some cases seen, but its presence would appear to be indicative of comparative lowness of cerebral organisation. Thus the Mangabey, one of the Catarrhini, has an external perpendicular fissure. It is well marked again in the Gibbon, in the Chimpanzee and in the Gorilla. In the Orang, how­ ever, it is shorter and less obvious, and in Man it is but very poorly represented. Even on a single and not very impor­ tant point like this, the reader will notice how the grada­ tions go. But besides these fissures that we have seen to be present, in Primates lower than the man-like apes, two new fissures appear. These are the calloso-marginal and the hippocampal. Both of them are only to be seen on the inner face of the hemi­ sphere. The calloso-marginal is a fissure or furrow that lies just above the thick. trans verse band of nerve-tissue that joins the two hemispheres near their bases, and is known as the corpus callosum (hard body). Its position just above this body, and just on the margin of the hemisphere, accounts for its name. - The fissure of the hippocampus is hard by that nervous mass, the hippocampus minor, that lies in the pos­ terior extension of the brain ventricle into the occipital lobe. It lies behind the middle of the inner face of the hemisphere, and is just by the junction of that inner face with the under surface. Both of these new fissures, then, are present in Man. But both of them appear first in his allies. The Orang, Chimpanzee and Gorilla have all of them a calloso-marginal and a hippocampal fissure on each side. The fissure of Sylvius and that of Rolando remain for con­ sideration. As to the former, the most noticeable thing in the ascending series is the gradual movement of it towards the horizontal plane. As the Sylvian fissure lies between the parietal and temporal lobes, it follows that the more vertical is its direction the smaller relatively is the anterior part of the brain. But as the line of the fissure passes from the nearly vertical position, parallel to that of Rolando, that we J8ee in the lower Primates, towards the almost horizontal posi­ tion it has taken in the human brain, the frontal and parietal �46 MONKEYS, APES, MEN. lobes, in which, are probably resident the higher mental func­ tions, increase in relative size. When we examine this fissure in the anthropoid brains, we find it least horizontal in the Gibbon, then in the Orang, then in the Chimpanzee and Gorilla. In these last its direction is but very slightly different from the direction of the fissure in Man. As to the fissure of Rolando, the most important point there is its position rather than its direction. The higher the animal the farther back is this brain-cleft; the larger is the proportion of brain-substance before it as compared with that posterior to it; the larger, in a word, is the frontal lobe as compared with the rest of the brain. Now, in the Chimpanzee .and in the Gorilla, this fissure lies well in front of the middle •of the brain. Not more than of the brain-substance lies in front of it. In Man, on the other hand, the fissure of Rolando lies either at about the middle of the encephalon or behind the middle. Not less than | of the brain-substance lies in front of it. But in the brain of the Orang the position of the fissure of Rolando is, by measurement, almost exactly mid­ way between that held by it in the brain of the Gorilla and in Man. (d) Convolutions.—A word or two as to the folds in the “brain of the Gibbon alone first. In this lowest of the Anthro­ pomorpha the occipital lobe is nearly destitute of convolutions, -and the ascending frontal and parietal folds are quite rudi­ mentary. It will be remembered that these lie respectively before and behind the fissure of Rolando. And here it should “be stated that these two convolutions are quite well marked in some monkeys below the Gibbon. Thus the Mangabey, already mentioned, has them both very distinctly shown. Tn the Gibbon appear the first traces of the annectent or bridgingover convolutions (p. 37). It is upon these and the supra-marginal lobule that our last words may be said. - And first, as to the annectent. In Man there are generally two of these on each side. They run across the perpendicular fissure, and therefore connect the occipital and parietal lobes of each side. One of them lies lower in a vertical line than the other. In the Chimpanzee, the first, or upper of the two anneo* tent convolutions of Man is wanting, and the second, or lower �MONKEYS, APES, MEN. 47 though present, is deeply placed in the fissure, not super­ ficial and visible on the exterior. In the Gorilla the first or upper is present, but is deeply placed, not superficial, and apparently the second is absent. The Orang has the first, and, unlike all the other anthrop­ oid apes, has this upper annectent convolution superficial ■and visible at once to the eye. The second is, however, .absent. Man has generally both the upper and the lower on each side, and both are superficial. But neither is quite a x in­ stant in the human brain, and in the Orang the first or upper, resembling, as it does that of man in its superficial position, resembles it also in its variability. Indeed, it is of these convolutions Rolleston wrote the words quoted on p. 44. Now lastly, as to the supra-marginal lobule. This, as 1 have said above (p. 36), was regarded as the crucial anatomi­ cal point of distinction between Man and his fellows. Man had the supra-marginal lobule and no other Primate had. Thus Gratiolet. Let us once more recall the exact position of this cerebral structure. It lies at the top of the Sylvian fissure folding over this from before backwards. All the three highest anthropoids have in their brains this convolu­ tion. It does not really appear until the Chimpanzee. In the brain of this ape the supra-marginal lobule is, at the best, only rudimentary. In the Orang it is more fully developed, and in the Gorilla brains that have been thus far examined, this convolution, supposed by Gratiolet to be the special prerogative of Man, is found to be existent in a yet more notable degree. With these discoveries vanishes the last imaginary distinction between the human and Simian brain. In its train vanishes the whole dream-series of anatomical prerogatives of Man and the very idea that he is a special creation. Printed and Published by Barcsey and Foote at 28 Stonecutter Street. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The people's Darwin, or Darwin made easy Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Aveling, Edward B. [1849-1898] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 48,48, 47 p. ; 18 cm. Notes: Contents: The Darwinian theory.--The origin of man.--Monkeys, apes, men. Printed by Ramsey and Foote, Stonecutter Street. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available R. Forder Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1860-1880] Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N1512 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Darwinism Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The people's Darwin, or Darwin made easy), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Charles Darwin Evolution (Biology) NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/8aaafc2c7fa99383a5f32a68e96ac521.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=nVQio%7Evt1jDsTFg6qDj4kyH-kyzkvS9h8z%7EvA8G8ttonpdLakPlsLF%7EOV-af715fQlB8-ZbpNyv2amvw2trWu4d8ac7oFuftrevBdhi9vpNWvFkZPIJYLc211QII31m60xcyaQD3MPo5e%7EA9pK8zYBGODQtfbuGHzf3bOG4eulOd25eaEX0sWxO4JtpJEsZlz-p5ZfyCOxvvLRsqzFi0vxR%7EqEwRwY43Z%7EFt0YMdggUPL0Sh7TU8HP-wV9KgwnOFTBGSNbbSGp-im-V8TiwTfJrOcw6%7E5HanBoI7oGWRCVqqR-l9hLx3HiLfeX3PSoOD%7Ev%7E5ymFC-SxXBz5J75dgOw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM cd63bf4fd4b71a4a71b785ec8ab9d764 PDF Text Text l^oral institution of <reat Britain * t I fl WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, April 20, 1855. I William: Robert Grove, Esq. M.A. Q.C. F.R.S. Vice-President, in the Chair. f < T. H. Huxley, Esq. F.R.S. On certain Zoological Arguments commonly adduced in favour of the hypothesis of the Progressive Development of Animal Life in Time. When the fact that fossilized animal forms are no lusus natures, but are truly the remains of ancient living worlds, was once fully admitted, it became a highly interesting problem to determine what relation these ancient forms of life bore to those now in ex­ istence. The general result of inquiries made in this direction is, that the further we go back in time, the more different are the forms of life from those which now inhabit the globe, though this rule is by no means without exceptions. Admitting the difference, however, the next question is, what is its amount? Now it appears, that while the Palaeozoic species are probably always distinct from the modern, and the genera are very commonly so, the orders are but rarely different, and the great classes and sub-kingdoms never. In all past time we find no animal about whose proper sub-kingdom, whether that of the Protozoa, Radiata, Annulosa, Mollusca, and Vertebrata, there can be the slightest doubt; and these great divi­ sions are those which we have represented at the present day. In the same way, if we consider the Classes, e. g. Mammalia, Aves, Insecta, Cephalopoda, Actinozoa, &c., we find absolutely no remains which lead us to establish a class type distinct from those now existing, and it is only when we descend to groups having the rank of Orders that we meet with types which no longer possess any living representatives. It is curious to remark again, that, notwith­ standing the enormous lapse of time of which we possess authentic records, the extinct ordinal types are exceedingly few, and more than half of them belong to the same class—Reptilia. �2 Jfr. Huxley on the Progressive [April 20, The extinct ordinal Reptilian types are those of the Pachypoda, Pterodactyla, Enaliosauria, and Labyrinthodonta; nor are we at present acquainted with any other extinct order of Vertehrata. Among the Annulosa (including in this division the Echinodermata,') we find two extinct ordinal types only, the Trilobita and the Cystidece. Among the Mollusca there is absolutely no extinct ordinal type ; nor among the Radiata {Actinozoa and Hydrozoa); nor is there any among the Protozoa. The naturalist who takes a wide view of fossil forms, in connec­ tion with existing life, can hardly recognise in these results anything but strong evidence in favour of the belief that a general uniformity has prevailed among the operations of Nature, through all time of which we have any record. Nevertheless, whatever the amount of the difference, and however one may be inclined to estimate its value, there is no doubt that the living beings of the past differed from those of the present period ; and again, that those of each great epoch, have differed from those which preceded, and from those which followed them. That there has been a succession of living forms in time, in fact, is admitted by all; but to the inquiry—What is the law of that succession ? differ­ ent answers are given; one school affirming that the law is known, the other that it is for the present undiscovered. According to the affirmative doctrine, commonly called the theory of Progressive Development, the history of life, as a whole, in the past, is analogous to the history of each individual life in the present; and as the law of progress of every living creature now, is from a less perfect to a more perfect, from a less complex to a more complex state—so the law of progress of living nature in the past, was of the same nature ; and the earlier forms of life were less complex, more embryonic, than the later. In the general mind this theory finds ready acceptance, from its falling in with the popular notion, that one of the lower animals, e. g. a fish, is a higher one, e. g. a mammal, arrested in development; that it is, as it were, less trouble to make a fish than a mammal: but the speaker pointed out the extreme fallacy of this notion; the real law of development being, that the progress of a higher animal in develop­ ment is not through the forms of the lower, but through forms which are common to both lower and higher : a fish, for instance, deviating as widely from the common Vertebrate plan as a mammal. The. Progression theory, however, after all, resolves itself very nearly into a question of the structure of fish-tails. If, in fact, we enumerate the oldest known undoubted animal remains, we find them to be Graptolites, Lingulae, Phyllopoda, Trilobites, and Cartilaginous fishes. The Graptolites, whether we regard them as Hydrozoa, Anthozoa, or Polyzoa, (and the recent discoveries of Mr. Logan would strongly �1855.] Development of Animal Life in Time. 3 favour the opinion that they belong to the last division,) are cer­ tainly in no respect embryonic forms. Nor have any traces of Spongiadce or Foraminifera (creatures unquestionably far below them in organization,) been yet found in the same or contempo­ raneous beds. Lingulae, again, are very aberrant Brachiopoda, in nowise comparable to the embryonic forms of any mollusk ; Phyllopods are the highest Entomostraca; and the Hymenocaris vermicauda discovered by Mr. Salter in the Lingula beds, is closely allied to Nebalia, the highest Phyllopod and that which approaches most nearly to the Podopthalmia. And just as Hymenocaris stands between the other Entomostraca and the Podopthalmia, so the Trilobita stand between the Entomostraca and the Edriopthalmia. Nor can anything be less founded than the comparison of the Trilo­ bita with embryonic forms of Crustacea; the early development of the ventral surface and its appendages being characteristic of the latter, while it is precisely these parts which have not yet been discovered in the Trilobita, the dorsal surface, last formed in order of development, being extremely well developed. The Invertebrata of the earliest period, then, afford no ground for the Progressionist doctrine. Do the Vertebrata? These are cartilaginous fish. Now Mr. Huxley pointed out that it is admitted on all sides that the brain, organs of sense, and re­ productive apparatus, are much more highly developed in these fishes than any others ; and he quoted the authority of Prof. Owen, * to the effect that no great weight is to be placed upon the cartilagi­ nous nature of the skeleton as an embryonic character. There remained, therefore, only the heterocercality of the tail, upon which so much stress has been laid by Prof. Agassiz. The argument made use of by this philosopher may be thus shortly stated:— Homocercal fishes have in their embryonic state heterocercal tails ; therefore, heterocercality is, so far, a mark of an embryonic state as compared with homocercality ; and the earlier, heterocercal fish are embryonic as compared with the later, homocercal. The whole of this argument was based upon M. Vogt’s examina­ tion of the development of the Coregonus, one of the Salmonidce; the tail of Coregonus being found to pass through a so-called hetero­ cercal state in its passage to its perfect form.f For the argument to have any validity, however, two conditions are necessary. 1. That the tails of the Salmonidce should be homocercal, in the same sense as those of other homocercal fish. 2. That they should be really heterocercal, and not homocercal, in their earliest con­ dition. On examination, however, it turns out that neither of these conditions hold good. In the first place, the tails of the Salmonidce, and very probably of all the Physostomi are not homocercal at all, * Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata, pp. 146-7. f Von Bar had already pointed out this circumstance in Cyprinus, and the relation of the foetal tail to the permanent condition in cartilaginous fishes.—See his “ Entwickelungsgeschichte der Fische,” p. 36. �4 , Mr. Huxley on the Development of Animal Life. but to all intents and purposes intensely heterocercal': Ihe chorda dorsalis in the Salmon, for instance, stretching far into the upper lobe of the tail. The wide difference of this structure from true homocercality is at once obvious, if the tails of the Salmonidce be compared with those of Scomber scombrus, Gadus ceglefinus, &c. In the latter, the tail & truly homocercal, the rays of the caudal fin being arranged symmetrically above and below the axis of the spinal column. i. AU M. Vogt’s evidence, therefore, goes to show merely that a heterocercal fish is heterocercal at a given period of embryonic life ; and in no way affects the truly homocercal fishes. /■' In the second place, it appears to have been forgotten that, as Vogt’s own excellent observations abundantly demonstrate, . rtf this heterocercal state of the tail is a comparatively late one in -W. < Coregonus, and that, at first, the tail is perfectly symmetrical, i.e. homocercal. In fact, all the evidence on fish development which we possess, is -jtffiWto the effect that Homocercality is the younger, Heterocercality the more advanced condition : a result which is diametrically opposed f' ' ' to that which has so long passed current, but which is in perfect accordance with the ordinary laws of development; the asymmetri­ cal being, as a rule, subsequent in the order of development to the symmetrical. The speaker then concluded by observing that a careful consider­ ation of the facts of Palaeontology seemed to lead to these results : 1. That there is no real parallel between the successive forms assumed in the development of the life of the individual at present, and those which have appeared at different epochs in the past; and 2. That the particular argument supposed to be deduced from the heterocercality of the ancient fishes is based on an error, the evidence from this source, if worth anything, tending in the oppo­ site direction. At the same time, while freely criticising what he considered to be a faUacious doctrine, Mr. Huxley expressly disclaimed the slightest intention of desiring to depreciate the brilliant services which its original propounder had rendered to science. [T. II. H.] A series of specimens of Aluminium, prepared by M. St. Claire Deville, in Paris, were laid upon the Library table by Dr. Hofmann. These specimens consisted of a medal, with the head of the Em­ peror Napoleon III., two bars, a watch wheel, and a piece of copper plated with Aluminium. A large piece of Tellurium, pre­ pared by Dr. Lowe, of Vienna, was likewise exhibited by Dr, Hofmann. Z � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On certain zoological arguments commonly advanced in favour of the hypothesis of the progressive development of animal life in time Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Huxley, Thomas Henry Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 4 p. ; 22 cm. Notes: William Robert Grove in the Chair. Delivered at the weekly evening meeting Friday, April 20, 1855. Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Royal Institution of Great Britain Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1855 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G5281 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (On certain zoological arguments commonly advanced in favour of the hypothesis of the progressive development of animal life in time), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Biology Animals Conway Tracts Evolution (Biology) https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/d051a9e31f0cc433f17cf2cb40a2ffbd.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=vlmPBHppdyUOT9cgT5EmGBV9ZJ9Dn4xKVAZYxxm47mT%7E5MHghTxBNthviFgPRANqTrQx1jk-CwQNh8W6%7EUeofvihjUohRBloxD%7EWs3IqsC5F7DiPgm9WAt%7Eaf3kAtKzEj5BC2hxaUPsM9E5KN3dyQ1HnarX8Y7xNi0HpkA-H3%7Er7QPEIVWITaLQVzliY1kAD6xYvmyoyZOTB8szMn6Gs08pvAHcUp9yZ1BNUpL171ypdYP8PMw8OI1-feJlkzvVhGeg0fk9kxEHyBLvHD1EQb-V0rx5mP0wIJbW16soJXNKqQgeTdaZKLtqIoxy425TzTObEbtfweBdEkNvqc7Rlhg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 6e05332969db6ae93aa67ee29d0c9871 PDF Text Text 14.—R. 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BENN. “Solidly bound to last a lifetime of hard wear, these splendid handbooks at a shilling each belong to an age of wonders.”—Birmingham Gazette. London: WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. �N £ K v_ t f* NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY THE > ■ STORY OF CREATION A Plain Account of Evolution BY EDWARD New Edition, CLODD Revised [Issued by arrangement with Messrs. Longmans for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited} WATTS & CO., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. I9I3 �“ First man appeared in the class of inorganic things, Next he passed therefrom into that of plants. For years he lived as one of the plants, Remembering nought of his inorganic state so different; And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state, He had no remembrance of his state as a plant, Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants, Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers ; Like the inclination of infants towards their mothers, Which know not the cause of their inclination to the breast. Again, the great Creator, as you know, Drew man out of the animal into the human state. Thus man passed from one order of nature to another, Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now. Of his first souls he has now no remembrance, And he will be again changed from his present soul.” Masnavi (Bk. IV.) of Jalal ad Din (13th Century). BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. First Edition January 1888 ; Reprinted March andJuly 1888, June 1890, March 1891 ; Revised Edition December 1893 ; Reprinted February 1896 ; April 1898 ; New Edition January 1901. First issued as R.P.A. Reprint {revised) 1904; reprinted 1906, 1910 and 1913. �PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The scope and purpose of this book are explained in the Introductory chapter, but the justification for its publication in these days of over-production has to be given. This lies in the fact that, so far as I know, no work of the kind exists in brief and handy compass; complete expositions of the theory of Evolution, foremost among which ranks Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, being in bulky volumes with which few readers have the time or courage to grapple. In attempting to give a clear idea of the mechanism of the universe, I have felt the difficulty expressed years ago by such authorities as Sir W. R. Grove and Professor Tyndall, arising from the lack of precision in standard books on physics in the use of the terms “force” and “energy.” When talking over this matter with my friend Grant Allen, I was delighted to find that he had published (although privately) a pamphlet on the subject, in which rigid and definite meanings are given to “ force ” and “ energy ” as the twofold and opposite forms of Motion manifest through Matter; and in that sense, as affording the reader a clearer conception of cosmic dynamics, those terms are used throughout this book. Mr. Allen has plunged me deeper in his debt by the labour of reading my proof-sheets, a service which, to their further gain, has also been kindly rendered by my friend Mr. H. W. Bates, F.R.S. The chief authorities consulted in the preparation of this book are duly acknowledged in foot-notes. As for the work as a whole, there is probably not a new idea in it, but only an attempt to explain matters of abiding interest and deep significance in as simple and untechnical a style as possible. E. C. Rosemont, Tufnell Park, London, N. December, 1887. NOTE TO NEW EDITION. A Book which has reached its majority should justify its place by keeping abreast of its time >hence this new edition has been subjected to such revision as new discoveries require. Perhaps among the more notable of these, are the evidence as to the disintegration of the so-called “ elements,” and as to the further effacement of distinctions between plants and animals. Strafford House, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. December, 1909. E. C. �TO GRANT ALLEN. My dear Allen, The inscription of this little book to you, whose interest in it has been constant since its framework was shown you, enables me not only to repeat the obligations which are set down in the Preface, but also to say, what is more gratifying to me, how deeply I value your friendship. Yours ever sincerely, EDWARD CLODD. �i CONTENTS ► PAGE Introductory ............................ 9 PART I.—DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER I. The Universe : its Contents . 1. Matter................................ 2. Motion................................ a. Force........................ b. Energy ................ II. Distribution of Matter in Space ................................ III. The Sun and Planets .... The Earth : General Features IV. The Past Life-History of the Earth................................ Character and Contents of Rocks of— 1. Archaean Epoch ... 2. Primary Epoch ... 3. Secondary Epoch . . 4. Tertiary Epoch ... 5. Quaternary Epoch . . V. Present Life-Forms............... Physical Constituents and Unity A. Plants................................ 1. Flowerless.................... 2. Flowering.................... B. Animals............................ 1. Protozoa.................... 2. Coelenterata................ 3. Echinodermata . . . 4. Annelida and Arthropoda . .................... 5. Mollusca.................... 6. Vertebrata ................ 12 12 14 14 15 18 20 21 24 27 28 31 36 40 44 49 49 5° 56 $6 59 61 62 66 67 PART II. —EXPLANATOR Y VI. The Universe : Mode of its Be­ coming and Growth ... 1. Inorganic Evolution I Stellar Systems J 2. Solar System .... 3. Earth............................ 78 80 82 PAGE CHAPTER VII. Origin of Life.............................. 83 Time : Place : Mode .... 83 VIII. Origin of Life-Forms .... 87 Priority of Plant or Animal . . 87 Cell-structure and Development. 89 IX. Origin of Species........................ 93 Argument: 1. No two individuals of the same species are alike ; each tends to vary . . 93 2. Variations are trans­ mitted, and tend to become permanent . . 94 3. Man takes advantage of them to produce new varieties.................... 94 4. More organisms are born than survive . . 95 . 5. The result is a cease­ less struggle for food and place................ 95 6. Natural selection tends to maintain the balance between living things and their surroundings 98 X. Proofs of the Derivation of Species................................ 105 1. Embryology.................... 105 2. Form................................ 106 3. Classification ' ... 106 4. Succession in Time . . 107 5. Distribution in Space . 107 Objections............................ 111 XI. Social Evolution.................113 1. Evolution of Mind . . 113 2. ,, Society . 115 3>, Language, Art, and Science . . 117 4. Evolution of Morals . 118 5. ,, Theology. 121 Summary................ .... 123 Index............................................125. TABLES PAGE tabular statement of matter and PAGE .... 44 ..'.... 56 EXISTING PLANTS AND ANIMALS MOTION.................................................................... jy geological epochs and typical life­ forms ....................................................... succession of typical life-forms . . 22 CLASSES OF MAMMALS.......................................... 74 43 RACES OF MAN.......................................................... 75 SUB-KINGDOMS OF ANIMALS �ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. 1. 2. 34. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. PAGE NEBULA OF ORION........Frontispiece SUN-SPOTS ... . 21 PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MOON.... 22 FOOTPRINTS OF FOSSIL BIRDS ... 25 TABLE OF STRATIFIED SYSTEMS WITH TYPICAL FOSSILS ................................ 26 OLENELLUS (A CAMBRIAN TRILOBITE) 27 FORAMINIFER................................................ 27 SECTION OF GRAVESEND CHALK . . 28 ORGANISMS IN ATLANTIC OOZE . . 28 DIATOMS................................................................ 28 CAMBRIAN CRUSTACEAN........................... 28 FOSSIL AND LIVING GANOID FISH . . 29 INSECTS IN AMBER..................................... 30 FOSSIL PLANTS FROM COAL BEDS . . 32 BELEMNITES..................................................... 33 FOSSIL SEA-LIZARD : PLESIOSAURUS . 34 FOSSIL FLYING LIZARD : PTERODACTYLUS..................................................... 34 FOSSIL BIRD : ARCHZEOPTERYX ... 35 AMMONITE.......................................... . . 36 FOSSIL BONY FISH : PERCH AND SAL­ MON ............................................................... 36 NUMMULITES FROM THE GREAT PYRAMID............................... 37 FEET OF ANCESTORS OF THE HORSE . 38 STONE IMPLEMENTS : ANCIENT STONE AGE ............................................................... 39 MAMMOTH, OR WOOLLY-HAIRED ELE­ PHANT ................................................................. 40 PREHISTORIC PICTURES........................... 41 STONE IMPLEMENTS : NEWER STONE AGE............................................................. 42 venus’s fly-trap.............................. 46 DIAGRAM OF CELL................................... 48 DIAGRAM OF CELL AND NUCLEI ... 48 DIAGRAM OF OVUM OF MAMMAL . . 49 DIAGRAM OF FLOWER......................... 51 FERTILISATION OF PLANT.............. 51 CYCAD OR PALM-FERN......................... 52 FERTILISATION OF FLOWERBY INSECT 53 TRANSITION FROM STAMENS TO PETALS IN WHITE LILY ..................................... 54 MONERA . . ..................................................... 56 AMOEBA......................................................... 59 INFUSORIA . ..................................................... 59 FIG- I i I i 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 4950. 51. 52. 53. 545556. 57. 58. 5960. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 7576. 77. 78. 79. PAGE STRUCTURE OFSPONGE........................... 60 HYDRA.................................................................... 6l JELLY-FISH.......................................................... 6l SECTION OF SEA-ANEMONE................... 6l CORAL . . ..................................................... 62 SEA-CUCUMBER............................................... 62 DIAGRAM OF ANNELID................................ 63 SECTION OF WORM ..................................... 63 ROTIFER OR WHEEL ANIMALCULE . . 64 PERIPATUS.......................................................... 64 GENERALISED INSECT................................ 65 NERVOUS SYSTEM OF BEETLE .... 65 SECTION OF EYE OF INSECT .... 65 ANATOMY OF BIVALVE MOLLUSC . . 67 SKELETON AND OUTLINE OF BAT . . 68 BALANOGLOSSUS .......................................... 69 SEA-SQUIRT ..................................................... 69 DIAGRAM OF SEA-SQUIRT..................... ..... 70 DIAGRAM OF LANCELET.......................... 70 MUDFISH . . ................................................ 71 GROWTH OF HAIR.......................................... 72 DUCKBILL .............................................. . 73 SPINY ANT-EATER..................... ..... 74 SKELETONS OF MAN AND APES . . . 75 DIAGRAM OF LIFE-DEVELOPMENT . . 77 CHLOROPHYLL IN LEAF-CELLS . . . 88 CELLS OF ROOT OF FRITILLARY . . . 89 CELL............................................... ..... 90 STAGES OF CELL-DIVISION..................... 90 MORULA OR MULBERRY-LIKE STAGE 91 GASTRULA OR PRIMITIVE STOMACH STAGE............................................................... 91 EMBRYO STAGE............................................... 91 EMBRYOS OF FISH, DOG, AND MAN . . 92 LEAF INSECT..................................................... 97 WALKING-STICK INSECT........................... 97 GORILLA WALKING.......................................... IOI BRAIN OF MAN AND CHIMPANZEE . . 102 EMBRYOS OF DOG AND MAN .... I06 EMBRYO OF TORTOISE..................................... I06 ARM OF MAN, FORELEG OF DOG, AND WING OF BIRD............................................... 107 FOSSIL BIRD-REPTILE : COMPSOGNATHUS............................................................... I08 GIGANTIC FOSSIL WINGLESS BIRD OF NEW ZEALAND IO9 ��N O U LA OF ORION. .Entartet freui a photograph taken zZz’zw/ ¿y UA-. Cowzwo« ÆzwzZzj/z^. �THE STORY OF CREATION INTRODUCTORY victions regarding the mutability of species, and finally to a solution of the problem of their origin, which, after the lapse of nearly a quarter of a century spent in the testing of every fact and ar­ gument telling in favour of or against his theory, was published in the famous “ Origin of Species.” That book is the On the 27 th of December 1831, Charles imperishable record of the most momen­ Darwin, then in his twenty-third year, tous advance in man’s knowledge of the embarked at Plymouth as volunteer nat­ operations of nature since the publication uralist on a five years’ voyage in the of Newton’s “ Principia.” Beagle, a ten-gun brig, which was com­ The pens of many experts, ready missioned to survey the shores of South writers withal, have enriched our America, and to circumnavigate the scientific literature with clear and charm­ globe. ing expositions of Darwin’s theory for Few marked the departure of that the benefit of a public which runs so ship; none could foretell what memor­ fast that it has little time to read. But able results would follow from her voyage, that theory deals only with organic or know that she carried the man whose evolution, i.e., with the origin of the theory was destined to revolutionise or myriad species of plants and animals; profoundly modify every department of and the prominence given to it in virtue human thought and every motive to of its more immediate interest makes us human action. But so it was. The apt to overlook the fact that it is only a true epoch-maker, never dreaming to : small part of an all-embracing cosmic what far-reaching and momentous issue I philosophy. For whatever lies within his work would lead, retired, some time the phenomenal—the seen or felt—and after his return, to a quiet home in Kent therefore within the sphere of observation, there to consider the significance of the experiment, and comparison, whether materials gathered during his voyage. galaxy which only the telescope makes The distribution of living things in known, or monad whose existence only South America, and markedly in their the microscope reveals, is subject-matter relation to those in the Galapagos of inquiry, both as to its becoming and Islands, a group lying five hundred miles as to its relation to the totality of things, from that continent, was among the chief causes 1 which led Darwin to con­ from Pocket-book for 1837, Darwin!s Life and Happy the man whose lot it is to know The secrets of the earth. He hastens not To work his fellows’ hurt by unjust deeds, But with rapt admiration contemplates Immortal Nature’s ageless harmony, And how and when her order came to be. Such spirits have no place for thoughts of shame. Euripides, Fragm. 902. 1 “ In July opened first note-book on Trans­ mutation of Species. Had been greatly struck from about the month of previous March on character of South American fossils, and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts (es­ pecially latter) origin of all my views.”—Extracts Letters, i, p. 276. Referring to the same matter, Darwin says in a letter to Sir J. D. Hooker, dated January 11, 1844, “ Gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” —Ibid. vol. ii, p. 23. �IO INTRODUCTORY It is this more general conspectus of evolution as a working hypothesis which, if it does not explain every fact, is incon­ sistent with none, that the following pages are designed to give in clear and, as far as possible, simple words. Before attempting this it is desirable to outline the phenomena which that theory explains; and the first part of this book will therefore describe such matters as the stuff of which all things are made, its combinations, affinities, and distribution ; the relation, likeness, and unlikeness between the stellar and solar systems, and between the earth and its fellow-planets; the varied forms and conditions of past and present life, and the relation between these and the inorganic or non-living—in brief, what­ ever makes up the visible universe. Many facts will, therefore, be set down which every schoolboy is supposed to know, but which most folks whose school days are long past have probably forgotten. But the repetition may make easier that which follows by way of explanation, and, moreover, may foster the growth of that feeling of an under­ lying and indivisible unity between the remote and near, the past and present, the living and non-living, which is apt to lie dormant when things in chemical or vital relation are treated as separate, or as differing in kind. Astronomer or chemist, geologist or palaeontologist, psychologist or physiologist, botanist or zoologist, all are members one of another, and none can say to his fellow, “I have no need of thee.” The astronomer captures the truant light from the stars, and the chemist, decom­ posing it, compels from it the secret of their structure, even of the direction in which they travel. The geologist rives the strata asunder, and discloses their succession and contents; the palaeonto­ logist, disengaging the fossils embedded in them, or altogether composing them, finds the ancestral forms of living species and the missing links in the unbroken chain of life. The psycholo­ gist may analyse and catalogue the I operations of the mind, but the key to understanding them lies in the study of brain structure and function, of which the physiologist is master; while the botanist and zoologist alike miss the significance of the phenomena of plant and animal life if these are treated as separate departments of biology. Truly, as Emerson says, “the day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the unity in things.” Yet must we exclaim with the chorus in the “ Antigone,” and in these days with a deeper meaning, “Who can survey the whole field of knowledge? Who can grasp the clues, and then thread the labyrinth?” For the mate­ rial is so wide-ranging and varied that only the barest outline is possible; and in dealing whether with star or species, the one must often represent the whole, the individual the class. “ For the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what constitutes the leading modi­ fications of animal and plant life it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small number of animals and plants.”1 Our knowledge will, however, thereby advance from the particular to the general, and be enlarged from a mere storage of facts to an all-inclusive philosophy of things ; so that although we may not escape errors of detail, we shall be saved by true apprehension of the universal. The limits of this book demand the ex­ clusion of reference to old cosmogonies, and to attempts to square them with facts. What this or that philosopher has guessed, what this or that ancient manu­ script or tablet records, about the heaven and earth, “and all that in them is,” has only an historical interest and value. To deal with such matters here would give them a false importance, and, moreover, confuse things proved with obsolete speculations. Still more does this apply when the mechanical explanation of the general and simple 1 Huxley’s American Addresses, p. 154. �INTRODUCTORY phenomena of the lifeless is extended to the special and complex phenomena of life in its ascending scale from moneron to man, without pause wherein caprice or chance could enter to disturb the sequence. But caprice and chance are not: the nebulous stuff of which the universe is the product held latent within its diffused vapours not only the elements of which the dry land and the waters are built, and from which the boundless varieties of plants and animals have been evolved, but aught else that, through work of man for good or ill, has composed the warp and woof of this world’s strange, eventful story. Be it borne in mind, however, at the outset, that although much is ex­ plained by evolution, and although no limitations to its application can be ad­ mitted within the sphere of the pheno­ menal, there remains much more than is dreamt of in our philosophy unexplained, around the impenetrable marge of which imagination, and the sense of mystery that feeds it, can play. “ Positive knowledge does not and never can fill the whole region of possible thought. At the utter­ most reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question, What^lies beyond ? ” 1 The whence of the nebula and its potential life is an abiding mystery that overawes and baffles us. The begin­ nings of the crystal are no less unknown and undiscoverable than the beginnings of the cell : the ultimate causes which lock the atoms of the one in angular em­ brace, and which quicken with pulsating life the corpuscles of the other, lie beyond our ken. And if of the beginnings 1 First Principles, p. 16, 3rd eel. 11 nothing can be known, so is it with the things themselves, which affect us by their colour, their weight, and movement. They remain the unknown cause of sensations which are themselves, as Helmholtz says, and as Descartes said two centuries before him, only symbols of the objects of the external world, corresponding to them in some such way as written characters or articulate words to the things which they denote. There is no greenness in the grass; there is no redness in the rose; there is no hardness in the diamond : that which our sensations report to conscious­ ness as colour and hardness being the result of myriads of unlike motions, some of which are repeated as often every second as there are seconds in thirty mil­ lions of years. Thought and emotion have their ante­ cedents' in molecular changes in the matter of the brain, and are as completely within the range of causation and as capable of mechanical explanation as material phenomena, but of them no material qualities, as weight and occu­ pancy of space, can be predicated. Heat may be expressed in equivalent foot­ pounds, light and sound and nervous transmission in measurable velocities, but these never. We cannot make the passage from chemistry to conscious­ ness, or transform motions of nerve-tissue into love, reverence, and hate. But let us, without further preamble, advance to the matter in hand, since, to quote the author of the Book of Macca­ bees, “ it is a foolish thing to make a long prologue and to be short in the story itself.” �PART I.—DESCRIPTIVE Chapter I THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS The Universe is made up of Matter and Motion. i. Matter.—Under this term are comprised all substances that occupy space and affect the senses. Matter is manifest in four states—solid, liquid, gaseous, and ultra-gaseous in the form of electrically-charged corpuscles projected into space. It is probably also present throughout the universe in the highly tenuous form called ether. Between the above states there is no absolute break, matter assuming any one of them according to the relative strength of the forces which bind, and of the energies which loosen, the component parts of bodies ; in other words, accord­ ing to the temperature or pressure. E.g., water becomes solid when its latent heat or contained motion is dissipated, and gaseous to invisibility when its particles are driven asunder by heat.1 Since the ultimate nature of matter remains unknown, we can only infer what it is by learning what it does. The actions of bodies, whatever their states, are explicable only on the assumption that the bodies are made up of infinitely small particles which, in their combined state as mechanical units, are called molecules; and in their free state are called atoms. The molecule is a com­ 1 In choosing water as an example, its peculiar action in expanding -as it approaches the solid state should be noted. Perhaps this is due to the form in which, as in snow, its molecules crystallise. pound body reduced to a limit that cannot be passed without altering its nature. The atoms, or so-called elementary substances, number, as far as is known at present, between seventy and eighty, but many of them are extremely rare, and exist in such minute quantities as to be familiar only to the chemist. They were called “atoms” on the assumption of their indivisibility, but this has been recently disproved. The atom is an ag­ gregation of what are called “ electrons,” which are in “ a state of rapid interlocked motion,” and concerning which, Sir Oliver Lodge says, “it is a fascinating guess that they constitute the funda­ mental substratum of which all' matter is composed . . . On this view, the in­ gredient of which the whole of matter is made up, is nothing more or less than electricity.”1 It is estimated that an atom of hydrogen contains 700 electrons ; an atom of sodium 16,000, and an atom of radium 160,000. “The spaces be­ tween them are enormous compared with their size—as great relatively as are the spaces between the planets in the solar system.” An atom of matter possessing an electron in excess is called an “ion,” and it is the “ ions ” which act, a negative charge causing the impulse to motions of enormous velocity. Each atom may be compared with the solar or stellar 1 Romanes Lecture (1903), Modern Views on Matter, pp. 12, 13. �THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS systems as containing a number of bodies moving in rapid orbits. But the com­ parison fails when the age of the one and that of the other is estimated, since “ it is probable that the changes in the foundation stones of the universe, the more stable elemental atoms themselves, must require a period to be expressed only by millions of millions of centuries.”1 Eighty years ago, Dalton, working in no luxurious laboratory, but with the meagre apparatus of a few cups, penny ink-bottles, and home-made thermo­ meters and barometers, discovered that atoms combine in definite proportions of weight and volume with other atoms. For example, whether we take water in large or small quantities from the clouds, or from the ocean, or from the fluids of living things, and decompose or break up its molecules, they will always be found to contain sixteen parts by weight of oxygen to two parts by weight of hydrogen; whether we take salt from the sea or from the blood of animals, its molecules always consist of fixed propor­ tions of chlorine and sodium, thirty-five and a half parts of the one and twentythree of the other; in each and every case any excess of either element remains uncombined—left out in the cold for want of a partner. Dalton’s discovery changed chemistry from a qualitative to a quantitative science, giving an impetus to research which at last promises to bring us within sight of the fulfilment of Faraday’s prophecy, that “ in the end there will be found one element with two polarities.” Many workers followed on the lines laid down by Dalton, notably Prout, who formulated the theory that the atomic weights are multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen, the lightest of the so-called elements, which he argued might be regarded as the primordial element, the materia prima, from which the others are formed by successive con­ densations. 1 Ibid, p. 25. 13 The researches of the past few years establish the fact that certain of the elements possess such strongly marked likenesses as to warrant their classification into groups, but these groups did not appear to be connected with one an­ other, nor to have any relation to the far larger number of elements not fall­ ing into groups. Recently, however, a marked advance towards proof of the common origin of all the elements has been made by a Russian chemist, Mendelejeff,1 who, following Newlands, has shown that if they are arranged, in the order of their atomic weights, from hydrogen as 1, to radium,2 the heaviest yet known, as about 225,3 “the series does not exhibit continuous advance, but breaks up into a number of sections, in each of which the several terms present analogies with the corresponding terms of other series. Thus, the whole series does not run a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, &c. &c., but a, b, c, d; A, B, C, D; a, ft, y, 8, and so on, in recurring similarities.” In this we have a periodic law, as it is called, which embraces all the elements according to the increasing value of their atomic weights, and which has restored to their rightful place in the succession certain elements for which no place in any of the series of groups could be found. More than this, and as evidenc­ ing the fruitful play of the imagination, Mendelejeff, finding certain gaps be­ tween neighbouring elements, pointed out that they could be filled only by elements possessing chemical and physical properties which he accurately specified. And, sure enough, some of these vacancies have been filled by the discovery of elements with the properties which Mendelejeff predicted they must possess. This is as interesting a romance as the discovery of Neptune, the exist­ ence of which, it will be remembered, 1 Cf. Ad. Wurtz’s Atomic Theory, pp. 154-163. 2 “This strange substance, in which the riddles of matter and energy seem to be focussed.”—Edinburgh Reviezv, Oct. 1903, p. 387. 3 So Madame Curie computes it. �14 THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS M. le Verrier and Professor Adams in­ dependently deduced from the anomalous movements of Uranus, which “ swam into the ken ” of Dr. Galle at Berlin when he pointed his telescope to that part of the heavens where the mathe­ maticians told him he would find the planet. The elements seldom occur in a free state, nearly all bodies being compound, or formed by the union of two or more, rarely exceeding four, elements. Oxygen, which is the most abundant and important of all, and, when uncom­ bined, a tasteless and invisible gas, enters into nearly one-half of the crust of the globe ; while of such limited variety of stuff is the infinite complexity of things in earth and heaven produced, that the mass of matter in the universe, as the spectroscopic analysis of light radiated from the heavenly bodies shows, is made up of about fourteen elements. Living things are mainly ctfrnposed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. - Our knowledge of molecules, as of atoms, is yet in its infancy, and it would seem that particles which are beyond the range of our most powerful micro­ scopes to reveal may be as astoundingly complex as the giant orbs of the heavens—nay, as the universe itself. Many ingenious experiments and cal­ culations have been made to arrive at their size and structure, but they leave the problem where they found it. The seven-hundred-millionth part of an' inch is considerably under the thickness to which, if it could be done, a plate of zinc or copper could be reduced without making it cease to be zinc or copper as we know and handle them. The film of a soap-bubble scarcely reaches the millionth of a millimetre (’03937 of an inch) in thickness. The size of a molecule of water is about ■g’criy'ôînj'crôîy of an inch in diameter ; that is to say, if a drop of water the size of a pea were enlarged to the size of the globe, the molecules would be about as large as | cricket balls. The number of mole­ cules of albumen in a cube of of an inch of horn is reckoned at seventy-one billions; while the egg of a mammal, which averages of an inch in diameter, may be estimated to contain “so many molecules that, if one were lost 01 developed in every second, they might not all be exhausted until after five thousand six hundred years.”1 But, as showing how only approximate such estimates are, the highest optical aid brings us no nearer a knowledge of the ultimate structure of organic bodies than we should be of the contents of a newspaper seen with the naked eye one-third of a mile off. It is, however, impossible for the mind to grasp the ideas which such figures and comparisons are intended to give. We have now reached a point when the grounds for the assumptions made concerning the nature of matter through­ out space, whether in masses, large or small; in molecules, atoms, electrons, or in the tenuous ether, must be stated. If atoms are changeable only in their relations through combination with other atoms, and in their distribution in space, it follows that all changes are due to motion. 2. Motion.—Motion throughout the universe is produced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or lessened, by two indestructible powers of opposite nature—(«) Force, and (¿) Energy. (i?) For the present purpose, Force is defined as that which produces or quickens motions binding together two or more particles of ponderable matter, and which retards or resists motions tending to separate such particles. When Force acts between visible masses of matter, large or small, distant or near, it is called Gravitation ; when it acts between the molecules compos­ ing masses it is called Molecular 1 Cf. Mr. Sorby’s Presidential Address to the Royal Microscopic Society, Microscopic lournal, March, 1876. �THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS Attraction, or Cohesion; when it acts between the atoms uniting them chemically;into molecules it is called Chemical Attraction, or Affinity. As Force inheres in, and can never be taken from, ponderable matter, every atom possesses the tendency to attract, and, in the absence of any opposing energy sufficient to overcome such tend­ ency, the power to attract, every other atom, as well as to resist any separating power or counteracting energy. The sum-total of Force is constant, and its several qualities are grouped under one doctrine, called the Persistence of Force. (¿) For the present purpose, Energy is defined as that which produces or quickens motions separating, and which resists or retards motions binding to­ gether, two or more particles of matter or of the ethereal medium. The sum-total of Energy in the uni­ verse is a fixed quantity, but it is not, like Force, bound up with matter so that it cannot be transferred. It exists whether it acts or not, and therefore it can be stored up. Energy is of two kinds, active and passive, or, in the terms of science, kinetic and potential. E.g., a stone lying on a roof or on a mountain ; a clock wound up but not going; a bed of coal; a barrel of gunpowder; have potential energy. This becomes kinetic when the stone falls, the clock goes, the coal burns, or the powder explodes. Not only does the potential pass into the kinetic, and vice versa, but the several forms of kinetic energy pass into one another—motion into heat, heat into electricity, electricity into heat, light, and chemical action ; a definite amount of any one form of Energy passing into an equivalent amount of the other, the one disappearing as the other appears. And the tendency of all passive Energy is to be converted into active Energy until a dead or uniform level is reached, as in bodies of the same temperature, wherein no differences of separating 15 power remain. The significance of this will be apparent when the ultimate destiny of the universe is considered. These qualities of convertibility and indestructibility are grouped under one doctrine, called the Conservation of Energy. The Persistence of Force and the Conservation of Energy may be grouped together under the doctrine of the In­ destructibility of Motion. Force is the attracting or pulling power ; Energy is the repelling or pushing power ; and by the antagonism of these the work of the universe is done. Every mass pulls every other mass by the force of gravi­ tation ; the earth the moon, the sun the earth, some other star the sun, and vice versa. And the moon would fall to the earth, as also the earth to the sun, but that the energy of their orbital motion overcomes the force. When a loaded wagon is pulled, especially uphill, the muscular power which, in the form of kinetic energy, is expended by the horgfe overcomes the attractive power inherent in the earth to draw the wagon towards its centre and keep it there. When the energy of heat which drives asunder the particles of bodies, changing them from the solid to the liquid or gaseous form, is expended, then the particles resume the solid form in virtue of the force of cohesion. If Force had unresisted play, all the atoms in the universe would gravitate to a common centre, and ultimately form a perfect sphere in which no life would exist, and in which no work would be done. If Energy had unresisted play, the atoms in the universe would be driven asunder and remain for ever separated, with the like result of change­ less powerlessness. But with these two powers in conflict, like the Ahriman and Ormuzd of the old Persian religion, the universe is the theatre of ceaseless re­ distributions of its contents, whether in the sweep of the stars and their atten­ dant systems through space, or in the pendulum-like vibrations of the invisible �16 THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS particles of every body, or in the throbs of the ethereal medium. So rapid are the motions, the rebounds between each molecule in hydrogen gas numbering seventeen thousand millions per second, that even if the molecules were within microscopic range we could not see them; and yet these collisions are few compared with the oscillations of light waves, which number hundreds of mil­ lions of millions in the same time. Such action shows that just as there are spaces or distances between the stars measureless in their vastness, so there are pores or spaces between the mole­ cules of bodies, and between the atoms which compose the molecules (to say nothing of the spaces between the electrons in each atom), measureless in their minuteness. And if added proofs of these intermolecular, interatomic and interelectronic spaces were needed, we find them in the contraction and expan­ sion of bodies through the quickened or retarded vibrations due to the sepa­ rating energy manifest as heat; in the compressibility, although slight, of liquids; in the actual solidification of air and of certain refractory gases under extreme cold and pressure, nitrogen being frozen and hydrogen liquefied by the cold produced by their evaporation under the air pump. But more than this. These pores between invisible particles, these spaces between star and star, spaces so vast that the diameter of the earth’s orbit, measuring one hundred and eighty-eight millions of miles, seen from the nearest star, is but a pin’s point, are not vacant. Speaking of the force of gravitation, Newton said that to con­ ceive of one body acting upon another through a vacuum is so great an ab­ surdity, that no man wdio had “ in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking ” could ever fall into it. And the like applies to the transmission of light, heat, and other forms of energy between bodies far and near. Therefore for the explanation of these varied and yet related phenomena it is a necessary assumption that the minutest intervals between atoms, as well as the awful spaces of the universe, are filled with a highly rarefied, elastic medium called ether, which, ever tremulous with unentangled vibrations, is the vehicle of Energy alike from the infinitely great and the infinitely small. That matter should be unseen and unfelt is no new conception to us. Its existence in the ultra-gaseous state al­ ready referred to ; its invisibility in air— the vehicle of sound; in steam, and in substances vaporised by the voltaic arc —its extreme rarefaction in such bodies as comets, the stuff of whose tails, spreading across millions of miles, could be compressed into a small vessel ; prepare us to conceive unseen realities. Thus, when the sensory organs are powerless to report the facts, Science, excluding no faculty from wholesome exercise, bids Imagination use her larger insight to make clear the significance of the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. The value of the foregoing abstract of the relations between Matter and Motion will be proved or disproved in the degree in which it squares with the phenomena to be hereafter described and explained. Meanwhile the subjoined tabular sum­ mary may set the subject in a clearer light. �THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS 17 MOTION. MATTER. I ENERGY. I FORCE. Potential, or Passive. Kinetic, or Active.1 Masses Attraction between Masses, or Gravitation Separation of Masses (com­ monly called Visible Energy of Position) Ex. Stone on a roof A head of water Motion of Masses Ex. Moon’s motion round the earth Stone falling Water falling Molecules Attraction between Mole­ cules, or Cohesion Separation of Molecules Ex. Steam Motion of Molecules Ex. Steam condensing into liquid Heat-vibrating particles of a poker Atoms Attraction between Atoms, or Chemical Affinity Separation of Atoms Ex. Atoms in a free state Motion of Atoms Ex. Atoms rushing to form , molecules Electrons Ionic charges Paired electrons, i.e., equal positive and negative Extra negative (ions) Ether (?) (No evidence of aggre­ gating power inhering in it) electrons (All Kinetic Energy, ex­ cept the small proportion intercepted by bodies in space, passes from matter to the ethereal medium. This is the doctrine of the Dissipation of Energy) 1 Each kind of Kinetic Energy has separative, combining, and continuous or neutral motion. Example of Separative—a stone thrown upwards ; example of Combining—a stone falling ; example of Neutral—a top spinning in the same place. ... , , , , . . . Note.—The foregoing reference to atoms and electrical units or electrons has to be taken in connection with recent theories of atomic constitution propounded by Lodge, Crookes, Thomson, and other physicists. Note—The foregoing reference to atoms and electrons has to be taken in connection with recent theories of atomic constitution propounded by Lodge, Thomson, . Crookes and other physicists; theories which are not to be regarded as final. In dealing with cosmic dynamics, the following quotation from Sir Ray Lankester s fascinating Kingdom of Man may not be out of place : “ The discovery of the Hertzian waves and their application to wireless telegraphy is a feature of this period. The power which we have gained of making an instrument oscillate in accordance with a predetermined code of signalling, although detached and a thousand miles distant, does not really lend anv new support to the notion that the old-time beliefs of thought-transference and second sight are more than illusions based on incomplete observation and imperfect reasoning. For the important factors in such human intercourse—namely a signalling-instrument and a code of signals—have not been discovered, as yet, in the structure of the human body, and have to be consciously devised and manufactured by man in the only examples of thought­ transference over long distances at present discovered or laid bare to experiment and observation. (P. 88.) �Chapter 11 DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACE Matter is both visible and invisible, ponderable and imponderable. In its ponderable form it is distributed through­ out space in bodies of varying densities ; in its imponderable form it fills the in­ tervals between the particles composing those bodies, as also the vast intervals between the bodies themselves. The most important of these—as the sand by the sea-shore, innumerable—are the “ fixed ” stars, so called from having no apparent motion of their own, although in reality travelling at enormous velocities. Each of these, unless it be an extinct, burnt-out sun, shines by its own light, and is probably, like the sun, which is itself a star, the centre of a system of planets with their satellites or moons and other bodies. “One star differeth from another star in glory.” Not, speaking broadly, in the stuff of which all are made, for the light thrown by the spectroscope on the chemistry of the heavenly bodies has revealed their general identity of structure. No matter how distant the star, so long as the light emitted is strong enough; broken on prisms, it reveals through its spectrum not only what elements are present in the glowing vapour, but even the direction of the star’s motion, i.e. whether it is re­ ceding from or approaching our system. The annual parallax (or the apparent change of position as seen from opposite points of the earth’s orbit) of the nearest fixed star, Alpha Centauri, is nearly one second of arc, giving a distance of twenty millions of millions of miles. So vast is the interval, that our solar system would appear as only a point in space when viewed from this star, the light from which, travelling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second of time, takes nearly three years and a half to reach us, so that we see the star as it then shone. The differences between the stars are in their sizes, their brilliancy or magni­ tude, and their colours, this last giving some clue to their stage of development. For there are stars young, middle-aged, old, and decrepit; and there are stars cold and dead, radiating no energy, and whose existence can be known only by their influence exerted through the force of gravitation upon the proper motion of other bodies, as, eg., of Sirius by its un­ seen companion. Astronomers have not yet arrived at any certain conclusions regarding the general distribution of matter in space. But the combinations, as seen from our system, are as varied as they are complex. Besides double and multiple stars—their apparent nearness to one another often being due to their lying in nearly the same straight line from our system— there are the constellations, many of the names of which are relics of that animistic stage in man’s belief when everything was personified. There are also star-clusters, light, cloudy-looking patches, made up of suns which, from our point of view, lie densely packed together in numberless galaxies. Besides the fixed stars and their �DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACE systems, straggling in scattered groups on either side of the milky way or composing its cloud-like arch, there are the vast masses of glowing matter called, in contradistinction to the stellar nebulae, which the telescope has resolved into stars, gaseous nebulae. These are of regular and irregular shape, circular, elliptical, and spiral; they are the raw stuff of which suns and systems are formed. There are also dark nebulae capable of reflecting, and also of partially obscuring, light. These nebulae; the fixed stars, with whatever appertains to them, and the vagrant bodies known as comets, with their more or less associated myriad meteor streams, down to the fine cosmic dust that falls on polar snows or sinks into the deep ocean; comprise the ponderable matter of the universe. The sum-total of the radiant energy of all luminous bodies, save the small pro­ i? portion intercepted by one from the other, is in course of continuous transfer to the imponderable ethereal medium. The results of modern research into the structure of the universe, in which inquiry the late Richard Proctor took a distinguished and important part, are thus summed up by him in the article on “Astronomy” in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica : “The sidereal system is altogether more complicated and more varied in structure than has hitherto been sup­ posed ; in the same region of the stellar depths coexist stars of many orders of real magnitude ; all the nebulse, gaseous or stellar, planetary, ring-formed, elliptical, and spiral, exist within the limits of the sidereal system; and lastly, the whole system is alive with movements, the laws of which may one day be recognised, though at present they are too complex to be understood.” �Chapter III THE SUN AND PLANETS The Solar System comprises—i, the Sun; 2, the Planets, large, small, and minor; 3, Moons or Satellites; 4, Comets, together with Meteors or Shoot­ ing Stars. The Sun consists of a nucleus, sur­ rounded by envelopes called the photo­ sphere and the chromosphere, outside which lies the mysterious corona, whose delicate silver radiance forms the glorious nimbus of a total eclipse. The nucleus is a gaseous mass, burning at a temperature of which we have no con­ ception, being probably millions of degrees; but the condensation which goes on under the radiation of energy may have already reduced the core to a liquid or putty-like state. The disc which we see includes the vaporous photosphere, with its puzzling grain-like face, here and there pitted with the cloud-patches or spots, from the move­ ments of which we learn that the sun rotates on his axis in twenty-five days. The chief constituents of the chromo­ sphere are hydrogen and “ helium,” which last-named was discovered in the mineral “cleveite ” by Professor Ramsay in 1896, and which the spectroscopic researches of Sir William and Lady Huggins and Sir William Ramsay show may be a product of radium. It is from this atmosphere that the red prominences or tongues, which often reach a height of one hundred thousand miles, are expelled. Vast as is the sun’s volume, exceeding several hundred times all the other members of his system, he is by no means the biggest of the stars, and, as compared with them in bright­ ness, probably does not exceed the third or fourth magnitude. But the sun has the greatest interest and import­ ance for us, seeing that to him are due those manifold energies by which the processes of nature, both chemical and vital, are carried on within the limits of his system. Further, with the knowledge which has been gained during late years concerning the sameness of the stuff of which nebulae, stars, and planets are spun, the nature and arrangement of the contents of our solar system enable us to make lawful analogies concerning the contents of systems beyond it. Of the solar radiant energy the planets receive or intercept only the two hun­ dred and thirty millionth part, the earth receiving but the two thousand one hundred and seventy millionth part. Even a large proportion of this energy is immediately, and the whole of it finally, radiated into space. The planets, one and all, revolve in nearly circular orbits, but on rather differently inclined planes, round the sun, in virtue of that energy of orbital motion with which each was endowed at birth, and which counteracts the op­ posing force of the sun’s gravitation, which would otherwise pull them into him, absorbing them in his mass. In­ cluding the swarm of minor planets or asteroids, of which new ones are being �THS SUN AND PLANETS 21 The mass of matter called the earth frequently discovered, they are perhaps to be »timbered by thousands. _ They is of nearly spherical shape, being slight­ are of various sizes and densities, and ly flattened at the poles and bulged in different stages of progress and. de­ towards the equator. *It consists of a core within a rocky pay. The evidence for the primitive gaseous state of all bodies now possess­ crust, three-fourths of which is covered ing greater density will be given here- by a layer of water, and the whole after, but our system itself witnesses to surrounded by an atmosphere.1 The entire mass, solid, liquid, and the passage of planets and satellites to an ultimately solid form, Some, like gaseous, spins on its axis at the rate of our earth and, perhaps, Mars, have about one thousand miles every hour, cooled down sufficiently to be covered by a hard crust, and to be fit abodes for living crea tures ; others, like Jupi­ ter and correspondingly huge bodies, are still in a more or less heated and partly self-luminous condition. The smaller bodies have long been cold and inert, like our airiesSj SÌlent, and barren mOOtl. In her pale re­ flected light, her scarred surface, and her vast ringed craters, illumined no longer by flame of central fires, we learn that what she is the planetsand the sun him­ self will ®e day become. Th® moons revolve round their several plan­ qty under similar re­ paint of force and Fig. i.—Sun-spots. (From Orchard’s Astronomy.} freedom of energy as the planets themselves. The gaseous masses composing comets and speeds through space in its orbit and streams travel in very round the sun at the rate of one thousand eccentric orbits. In fine, motion is miles every minute. The atmosphere is composed, in the everywhere, in ether, atom, molecule, and mass ; the sun, like his fellow-stars, main, of the uncombined elements has his proper motion, carrying with oxygen and nitrogen ;2 the water is chiefly him planets, satellites, and whatever compounded of combined but mobile Other bodies are within the influence of oxygen and hydrogen. Of every hundred his force of gravitation. This is itself 1 Taking the earth’s surface as I, the sea obedient to the attractions of bodies covers 0’734 part, and the land 0’266 part. perchance as much exceeding his own 2 Add to these water-vapour, and, among in power as he exceeds the mote dancing other gases, argon, neon, &c., discovered within the last few years. in his beams. �22 THE SUN AND PLANETS parts of the crust, ninety-nine are made up of about sixteen out of the seventy or more elementary substances, and of. these sixteen the larger number exist in small proportion. It is com- the earth is about five times and a half that of a body of the same size made of pure water, but the large extent covered by the ocean in the southern hemisphere, whither the Fig. 2.—Photograph of the moon, taken at Paris by MM. Loewy and Puiseux on September 19, 1894. (Inverted as seen in a telescope.) puted that fully one-half of the crust consists of oxygen which it has taken into itself from the atmosphere, and that already one-third of the water of the ocean has been absorbed by minerals.1 The average density of 1 Geikie’s Text-book of Geology, pp. 30, 298. tendency to collect was probably manifest at the outset when the steamy vapours condensed and filled the depressions in the crust, points to an excess of density in that direc­ tion. What the inside of the earth is like no �THE SUN AND PLANETS man can tell1; the latest theory, which has the support of Sir Archibald Geikie, is that beneath the solid crust there is a molten magma over one hundred miles in depth, which shades continually inwards into a gaseous centre. This theory goes far to explain the crumpled and fractured surface, and also earthquake movements and volcanic action. These show that the unquiet earth has not yet lost the whole of the original store of energy which it acquired during the aggregation of the particles of which it is built up in their passage from a diffused nebulous state to one of increas­ ing density under the action of the force of gravitation. But the escape of that energy through the crust to the ethereal medium is unintermittent, and its final dissipation into space is therefore only a question of time. The crust was probably never uniform­ ly smooth, because the contraction of the interior mass as it cooled would bring about a state of tension causing shrinkage of the surface, producing intense heat. Hence the beginnings of those wrinkled, cracked and crumpled features which other agencies would score more deeply in the face of the globe, giving thereby beauty and variety in valley, mountain, table-land, and all else that makes the earth so fair a dwell­ ing place. Our knowledge of the crust extends only to a relatively small depth, the aggregate thickness of the strata or layers of rock already measured being about twenty-five miles, or the one hundred and sixtieth part of the earth’s semi­ diameter. The term “ rock ” is applied alike to hard granite and loose sand, to ore veined with metal and to mud from country lanes, as including the materials composing the crust or shell. Rocks are divided into two classes—un stratified and stratified. The unstratified, which 1 Cf. Geikie, Text Book, vol. i., p. 73 (1903 edition). 23 are also called igneous or Plutonic, embrace all rocks which, as they now exist, have been fused together by heat, or erupted from the earth’s interior by volcanic agency. The stratified, which are also called aqueous or Neptunic, embrace all rocks which have been deposited as sediment by the action of water or of the atmosphere, or which are due to the growth and decay of plants and animals. With this class are grouped the metamorphic, for the most part stratified rocks which have been meta­ morphosed into a crystalline state by the action of heat and pressure, resulting in effacement of their original character, and in the destruction of traces of any organic remains in them. Throughout the entire series of rocks, the newer have been, and are being, formed out of the older, which, unless upheaved, are always found at the bottom ; but of the original crust perhaps no trace remains. The depth to which the unstratified rocks extend is unknown, and as they contain no organic remains they tell us nothing concerning the origin and succession of life on the earth. The stratified rocks, which alone throw light on this question, have been divided for convenience, and not as implying any gaps between their several formations save where natural causes have operated, into four, or sometimes five, epochs. These, together with the typicalremains of plant and animal associated with each, are as follows :—1 Epoch. Thickness of Strata Archaean or Eozoic {dawn life, chiefly 70,000 metamorphic) . Primary or Palaeo­ zoic {ancient IBe). 42,000 Secondary or Meso­ zoic {middle life). 15,000 Tertiary or Caino­ zoic {recent life) . 3,000 Quaternary or Post­ 600 Tertiary . . . Plant Animal Monera feet Algae (Chiefly marine) Fishes ,, Ferns „ Pine forests Reptiles „ Leaf-bearing Mammals forests Existing species ,, �Chapter IV THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH Geology deals with the stuff of which the earth is made, its origin, structure, and arrangement. But so interrelated is the material of which all things are formed, that inquiry into the structure of rocks has to be extended well nigh at the outset to their contents—that is, to the fossil remains of ancient life which are not only preserved within the larger number of strata, but entirely compose vast masses, as coal-beds, chalk hills, and coral islands. Therefore the inter­ est which the study of the erupted, firefused, and water-laid rocks awakens, especially in their witness to ceaseless changes through an ever-receding past, becomes more immediate and human when the relics of ancient life-forms are examined; and when their appearance, persistence, or disappearance, their order and succession in an ever-varying, ever-ascending scale, are traced. For in them lies the record of life on the earth through measureless time; the life that was, parent of all life that is; from simple slime-speck to structure of subtlest complexity named man, with its passionate story of agonies and joys, of struggle towards a “kingdom of heaven ” which remains the ideal of the noblest of our kind. True it is that the record is very imperfect, that the gaps remain wide and numerous, even when supplemented by fossils from different parts of the globe. But the wonder is that the blanks are not greater when the nature and extent of the changes to which all [ [ I I rocks have been, and are being, sub­ jected, are considered. In addition to the havoc and effacement wrought by the earth’s internal heat, the formation of every deposit involves the waste of an older deposit, which has in its turn been derived from more primitive stuff, | the effect throughout being muti­ lation or destruction of the organic contents. It is impossible that the vast number of lowest life-forms, whether plant or I animal, should have been preserved. | Traces of marine organisms survive in i the trails and borings of sea-worms, or in the imprint of carcasses of jelly-fish stranded on the ripple-marked mud of ancient sea-shores; but of the softbodied creatures themselves not a vestige remains. Only such hard parts as the shells or skeletons of animals, and the bark, wood, and seeds of plants, would reach the fossil state in more or less perfect form; and even their preservation is contingent upon the nature of the beds in which they are interred. As it is, but a remnant of all that ever lived in the water, and a far less proportion of the smaller popula­ tion of the land, are represented in actual fragments. Sometimes only an impression survives, as when a dissolved shell has left its witness in cast or mould, in clay or mud, or an extinct bird or reptile its footprints on-the sands of a far-off time. Sometimes, in the compensating action of nature, chemical agents, in destroying the original �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTFI structure, infiltrate the vacancy with minerals, replacing the form, occasion ally in minutest detail. Bich as are igneous rocks in wealthyielding mineral veins and ores, they are, save where recent plants and animals have been accidentally enveloped in the flowing lava or dust of volcanic eruptions, destitute of fossils. There was a period in the earth’s history when life was not, and its beginnings, which, as will be shown hereafter, were probably in polar were certainly subsequent to the ^5 the remains of animals, composing chalk, limestone, and other organically-derived rocks. But whatever their source, and however much the original order of strata has been deranged by hidden agencies which have tilted them at all angles, cleaved and contorted them, and superposed the older on the newer, there is a well-ascertained succession in them which their fossils alone have enabled us to determine, each formation having its own characteristic kinds or dominant types of plant and animal. Fig. 3.—Footprints of Birds, with (2) marks of Raindrops. ejection of die molten or pasty masses which cooled into true volcanic or fireformed rocks. Although fossils are found only in sedimentary rocks, they are not uni­ versally present in them. Varied and mixed as those rocks are in composition, it suffices here to group them under two heads- - -1, those derived from sediment, in its several states of gravel, sand, and mud: and 2, those formed of the re­ mains of plants, as coal in its several stages from peat to the hard graphite or black-lead of the older formations; or of Not that there are any hard and fast lines between the disappearance of an earlier species and the appearance of & later species, the forms being often com* mingled. Some of the low and simple types persist through almost all for­ mations ; some of the more complex are found only in one or two formations ; but there is a merging of one into another ; there are gradations and alli­ ances of type, as of birds with reptilian characters, and vice versa. And although seemingly isolated types occur, or the divergence between earlier and later types �2Ó THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH Fig. 4.—TABLE OF STRATIFIED ROCKS. EPOCH. SYSTEM. Quaternary. 13. Recent STRATA. . TYPICAL FOSSILS. . ' 12. Pliocene . . ix. Miocene . . Tertiary or Cainozoic. 10. Eocene Mastodon. Univalve (Cerithium). Conifer (Sequoia). Secondary or / Jurassic or Oolitic Mesozoic. 1. Nummulite. 2. Univalve (Natica). 1. 2. 3. 4. 7- Triassic . . z 6. Permian . . Pearl Mussel (Inoceramtes). Ammonite, new form (Turrilitei). Bivalve (Pecten). Ammonite, new form (Hamitt£). p. 2. 3. 4. Bivalve (Pholadomya). Bivalve ( Trigonia). Cycad (Mantellia). Univalve (Nerintea). Fish-lizard (Ichthyosaur). Ammonite. Sea hly (Encrinus). Footprints of Labyrinthodon^ 5- Carboniferous. Primary or Palæozoic. 4- Devonian. . Bivalve (Bake-veilla). Lampshell (Products!}. Ganoid (Palæoniscus). Precursors of Ammonites (Gonialite . Club-moss (Lepidodendron). Horsetail Plants (Calamité). / \ Ganoid Fish (Pterichthys). ( I. Strophomena. Lampshells ! 2. Lingula. I 3. Pentamerus. Trilobite 4. Calymene. 3. Silurian . . Seaweed (Oldhamite). 2. Cambrian. . \ Archæan or Eozoic. I. Pke-Cambrian. �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH has blurred their relation, it will be seen that the modern are the ancient slowly and wondrously modified. In short, the life-history of the globe is one both of unbroken relation and 27 Silurian, from the Silures, a tribe of ancient Britons, the people formerly inhabiting the district; sometimes they denote typical features of the formation but they are the accepted nomenclature in treatises on geology, and are therefore adopted here. 1. Archaean : also named Eozoic {dawn life} and Pre-Cambrian. These rocks have different names in different parts of the globe. For example, in Shropshire they are called Uriconian (from the old Roman military station Uriconium, on the site of which the village of Wroxeter stands); in North America they are known as Laurentian, after the St. Lawrence river basin, and also as Huronian, after Lake Huron. They have been subjected to vast changes which prevent any systematic classification of them, and which make the placing of the few fossils—traces of worms, sponges, and plants—found in them, in any order of geological time very difficult. They fall into three main types: 1, coarse crystalline Fig. 5.— Olenellus : the characteristic fossil of the lowest Cambrian system. (From Geikie’s Text-Book of Geology ; by permission of Macmillan and Co., Ltd.) progress ; the gaps exist because the record is mutilated. Nature, like the Sybil of Cumte, has destroyed her books. The fossil-yielding rocks are sub­ divided into the systems shown on fig. 4. There is no one section of the earth’s crust where a complete series is to be found with layer superposed on layer like the skins of an onion ; but whatever gaps exist locally do not affect the relative age and place of each stratum, which, as remarked above, are fixed by the fossils. No uniform principle has governed the choice of the system-names. Sometimes they in­ dicate the place where a formation is markedly developed ; sometimes, as the Fig. 6.—Foraminifer, Glohlgerina bulloides, magnified seventy diameters. This form is found floating in tropical and temperate seas. gneisses and schists associated with plutonic rocks; 2, finer grained crys­ tallines associated with volcanic and metamorphic rocks ; and 3, sedimentary rocks with volcanic ashes and lavas. �28 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH “The longevity of an organic type has, on the whole, been in inverse pro­ portion to its perfection ”; and some of the lower types may smile at man’s “ claims of long descent,” for they have survived through the long and change­ bringing millions of years to this day, shedding their shells on the ocean floor, Fig. 7.—Section of Gravesend Chalk. Fig. 9.—Diatoms from “Infusorial Earth ” of Richmond, Virginia (highly magnified). • as their ancestors shed theirs, forming vast chalk' and limestone hills and mountain ranges in relatively shallow seas. Not in deep oceans, as was formerly held, since the fossils are shown to resemble present shoal water deposits rather than similar oozes found in water over a thousand fathoms deep, which further confirms the theory that the great ocean beds have never been up­ raised. While some secrete chalk, others secrete flint. Among the latter are the minute plants known as diatoms, whose remains compose, among other deposits, the “rotten-stone” used as polishing powder, of which no less than Fig. 8.—Organisms in Atlantic Ooze (highly magnified). Fig. io.—A Cambrian Crustacean (Hymenocaris). From Geikie’s Text-Book of Geology : by permis­ sion of Macmillan and Co., Ltd.) forty-one thousand million skeletons go to make up a cubic inch. 2. Primary.—The Cambrian rocks, although less metamorphic, add little to our knowledge of primitive plant forms, such as are preserved being probably algse, or seaweed, corresponding to the tangles covering large areas of the Atlantic, �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH especially the region called the Sargasso Sea. But the system is fairly rich in fossils of marine animals, themselves the descendants of a long line of perished ancestors. Sponges, sea-lilies, and low forms of mollusca, or true shell-fish, are found; but the typical and most perfect fossil is that of the three-lobed crustaceans called trilobites,1 which swarmed in those ancient seas, and survived till the Carboniferous period. The Silurian rocks, although ex­ hibiting in crumpled and rugged moun­ tain chains the action of agents both above and below the earth, are much 29 ancient of all known land animals is a scorpion found in the upper Silurian beds of both Scotland and Sweden ; while the marine remains are varied and numerous, comprising seaweeds, foraminifera, corals, star-fish, shell-fish of every kind, trilobites, and huger lobster-like crustaceans, sometimes measuring above six feet in length. But the most important fossils are those of the earliest known vertebrates, in the form of armoured fishes,1 allied to the sturgeon, and called ganoids (Gr. ganos, splendour; and eidos, form) from the brilliancy of their enamelled scales. In this seemingly sudden appearance Fig. ii.—A, Recent Ganoid Fish; B, Ganoid from Devonian strata. less metamorphosed than the preceding | of highly organised animals marking so systems. They are in large measure the great an advance in structure on the worn fragments of land areas which higher invertebrates, the imperfection of Stretched across Northern Europe for the geological record is brought home above two hundred miles into .the to us. For if later forms are modified Atlantic, the sediment being deposited descendants of earlier, then not only In a shallow sea which then covered are the transitional ancestral forms of Central and Southern Europe, and the the ganoids missing, but the species floor of which was slowly raised as a itself is enormously older than the fossils primitive European continent at the imply. The inquirer, however, need close of the Silurian period by subter­ not despair, for only a limited portion ranean movements. The land plants, of the dry land has as yet been explored which are the earliest as yet met with, with any completeness, and there are vast are allied to huge club-mosses, ancestors fossil-holding areas submerged and inac­ of the gigantic forest-kings of Devonian cessible ; yet one by one missing links and Carboniferous times. The most 1 Discovered by Professor Claypole near the 1 Trilobites with antennae have been found in the Hudson River shales. base of the Upper Silurian in Pennsylvania; of. Smithsonian Report, 1884, p. 622. �30 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH are being found. Probably the pre­ decessors of the ganoids, the skeletons of which are cartilaginous, were of a structure too soft to permit of their preservation in a fossil state. In this brief survey of the three earliest systems we have already traversed more than half the total thickness of the fossiliferous rocks, the deposit of which involved a lapse of time and series of changes of which no conception is possible. The base-line of our life is too short for measurement of the distance which separates the foraminifera from the ganoids ; of time, as of space, we see neither beginning nor end. The Devonian and Old Red Sandstone rocks, while evidencing frequent redistri­ bution of sea and land, have undergone, as compared with the older systems of the Primary epoch, but slight disturb­ ance from the upheaving and contort­ ing agencies beneath. They are widely diffused, extending far north within the Arctic circle; and although their fossil contents are very incomplete, they bring less . fragmentary witnesses to that con­ tinuity of life the record of which is so markedly broken in more ancient deposits. . This is specially apparent in the relative abundance of vegetable remains, by which we may for the first time construct some picture of plant-life on the globe in Palaeozoic times. Not only do we find huge tree-like plants of which our club mosses and ferns are pigmy representatives, but true trees, as proven by the concentric rings of growth in their trunks. Of land animals, the preservation of which is so rare in all deposits, there are no traces ; no reptiles wallow in the lagoons and marshy flats, neither are the verdant yet flowerless forests brightened by the plumage, nor their stillness broken by the song, of birds. But we find the earliest known insects; some happy chance, like that which envelops the insects of Tertiary forests in amber—the fossil resin of their conifers—has preserved a fragile wing, with the remains of a stridulating organ attached, as in the grasshopper and cricket, wherewith then, as now, mates were attracted or rivals challenged—per­ chance “ the first music of living things that geology as yet reveals.” Fresh-water fossils abound, but the predominant types are marine—large sponges and corals; “lamp-shell” mollusca, which have persisted in varying forms from Cambrian times to the present; crustaceans huger than any that have lived since, of which even the spawn masses are sometimes pre­ served. More or less special types appear and then vanish, through inability to adapt themselves to new surroundings and changed climates. But the De­ vonian is notably the “ age of fishes,” and its waters swarmed with the ganoid type. Coal is formed of compressed and chemically altered plants, and occurs in all water-laid rocks, although in very different states and kinds. Sachs remarks that every experiment on nutri­ tion with green-leaved plants confirms the theory that their carbon is derived solely from the atmosphere, and we get some idea how enormously large that derivation has been on “ reflecting that the deposits of coal, lignite, and turf spread over the whole earth, and the oituminous substances as great or even �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 3i greater in quantity which permeate moist atmosphere of those times, reached mountain formations, besides asphalte, a gigantic size, and had a world-wide petroleum, &c., are products of the range far into north polar regions, where decomposition of earlier vegetations, coal seams have been found. Of the which in the course of millions of years 1I animal life that dwelt amongst them we have taken from the atmosphere the know very little, nor do the extant frag­ carbon contained in these substances, ments represent a tithe of the forms then and transformed it into organic sub­ flourishing. In the later deposits the lower sub-kingdoms are represented by stance.” 1 The climate and soil, during long spiders and large scorpions ; by land­ eras of the Carboniferous system, snails, beetles, cockroaches,1 of which specially favoured the growth of plants above eighty species occur, walkingmost fitted for coal formation. A large stick insects a foot long, huge May-flies, part of Europe (and the like conditions and other insects; the honey-seeking, apply wherever the true coal measures pollen-carrying species being still absent abound) was then covered with shallow from the sombre forests. The first waters, both salt and fresh, divided by known land vertebrates appear in the low ridges, the bases of future mountain salamander-like and long-extinct am­ chains, and dotted with islands; while phibians called labyrinthodonts, from numerous rivers traversed the land, and the labyrinthine structure of their teeth. silted up lagoons and lakes with the The marine remains are still dominant. debris worn from older rocks. Vegetation The lower types persist; the trilobites flourished apace on these river banks and are on the verge of extinction, but higher marshy flats, and, with intermittent sub­ forms of the same group, allied more sidence of the soil occurring again and nearly to the lobster and the shrimp, again, was buried under sand and mud, succeed. The first known oysters becoming changed into coal of varying appear, and, to the joy of the epicure, seams of thickness. Hence the abun­ have survived all changes until now, dance of this mineral in the Carboni­ spreading themselves over the whole ferous strata, which, as a whole, yield northern hemisphere. Forerunners of more of value and variety for the service the beautiful ammonites are found; and of man than all the other, systems put the fish, while still of the armoured together. Sandstones for building; species, have a more reptilian character marbles for decoration; metals for than their Devonian ancestors. machines; coals wherewith to drive The life-features of the Permian system, them; purest oil from muddy shale; jet the last division of the Primary epoch, for the lapidary’s art ; loveliest colours, differ but little from those of the Car­ exquisite perfumes, and curative drugs boniferous ; the only, although im­ from gas-tar, even sugar therefrom, three portant, distinction is in the remains hundred tjmes sweeter than that from of true reptiles with crocodile-like the cane—these are the rich gifts of the characters. deep rocks, which, struck by a more 3. Secondary.—Although the old magic rod than Moses wielded, have theory of abrupt breaks between geogiven up their treasures for man’s needs 1 The cockroach is historically one of the most and delight. ancient, and structurally one of the most primi­ Of the plants forming the coal tive, of our surviving insects (cf. Miall and measures, the larger number are obliter­ Denny’s Cockroach, p. 22). It is amusing to ated, but they all belong to the lower find Gilbert White speaking of this household which the orders, as do the club-mosses, tree-ferns, pest, forinterest,we have to thankinsectEast, with curious as “an unusual in one of and other forms which, in the warm, my dark chimney closets; and find since that in 1 Sachs’ Leet, on the Physiol, of Plants, p. 294. the night they swarm also in my kitchen.” (Selborne, Obs. on Insects.} �32 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH logical epochs has yielded to that of continuity, the artificial divisions of the series of rocks have their convenience. And there exists marked distinction in hence we meet with few traces of the metamorphism which baffles examina­ tion of the earlier rocks; we can mark more definitely the boundaries Calamite. Fig. 13.—Fossil Plants from Coal-beds. feature between the Primary and Secondary formations. In the latter, as represented in the European area, volcanic action is much less manifest, of land and water, measure more accu­ rately the changes, and trace more clearly the relations between the succes­ sive life-forms, of which the marine are �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH still the preponderating, and the reptilian the most marvellous. In the earliest division of this epoch, the Triassic, many of the leading Palaeo­ zoic types are extinct. Several plants of the Coal and Permian systems have disappeared, and the flora consists mainly of ferns, of cycads or palm-ferns, and of conifers, or pines and ferns, to which the cycads are allied. Among the inverte­ brate animals certain molluscs are no longer found, but there is an interming­ ling of old and new types. Oysters and whelks and members of the cuttle-fish group are abundant. As yet fishes ex­ hibit no marked advance in structure, and the labyrinthodonts, the time-range of which is thus shown to have been enormous, are changed only in size, as their footprints evidence. Reptiles allied to the crocodile group, and sea-lizards, which attained gigantic size in later periods, are now the dominant types. Whether certain bipedal footprints in the Triassic sandstones are those of birds is doubtful; perhaps they are tracks of reptiles with bird-like movements. But in the absence of proof that they are due to birds, assuming that these preceded mammals in the succession of species,1 a great link is missing in the Trias, since that system has yielded teeth of the earliest known mammal.1 2 It was probably of the marsupial or pouched order, a form now represented most nearly by the Australian phalangers and the American opossums. The Jurassic or Oolitic system oc­ cupies extensive areas in both hemi­ spheres, and ranges from the Arctic circle to Australia. Its strata, largely composed of coral growths and other organic re­ mains, are rich in special life-forms which are limited to the Secondary epoch. 1 Cf. Heilprin, p. 161. 2 “ I entertain no sort of doubt that the rep­ tiles, birds, and mammals of the Trias are the direct descendants of reptiles, birds, and mam­ mals which existed in the latter part of the Palaeozoic epoch, but not in any area of the present dry land which has yet been explored by the geologist.—Huxley’s Critiques and Addresses, p. 213. 33 Its seas, which overspread the greater part of Europe, covering the large salt lakes of the Trias, swarmed with exquisite spiral ammonites, large and small; with conical bolt-like belemnites, allied to the cuttle-fish group; with lobsters, prawns, and crabs, which succeeded the trilobites and other crustaceans; with ganoid fishes, sharks, and rays. And “there were giants in those days ”—monsters of the deep—in the ferocious sea-lizards, with their fish-like bodies and flipper- Fig. 14.—Belemnites. like limbs; monsters of the land, too, of dread aspect and size seen neither before nor since, one found in North American beds being, it is computed, nearly one hundred feet in length, and above thirty feet in height. Very interesting and unique remains of the marine lizard plesiosaurus have recently been found in the shape of minute mummies under five inches long, in which the substance of the flesh is perfectly preserved, even the circle of the eyes and the constituent bones being clearly distinguished. There were flying lizards, winged like bats, B �34 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH hollow-boned like birds, and with claws, skin, and teeth like reptiles; and it is in a Jurassic limestone stratum that the addition to free claws to each wing, the tail is long, and made up of separate bones or prolonged vertebrae, a feature oldest known true bird, a creature about the size of a rook; called archaeopteryx, is found. It does not correspond to noted in the embryos of birds. The remains of a bird about the size of a crane, but with uncertain affinities, have also been found in the Juras­ sic beds of Wyoming. While the sea, then, as ever, was the more thickly peopled, the land had a far more important air-breathing population, both of small things and great. The hum of insect life filled the cycadaceous forests, butterflies 1 sported in the sunshine, spiders spread their webs for prey, and the remains of marsupials point to the range of these small but highly orga­ nised creatures over Western 1 Mr. Bates remarks that butter­ flies, owing to the registry of all changes of the organisation on the wings, are ‘1 better adapted than almost any other group of animals or plants to furnish facts in illus­ tration of the modifications which all species undergo in nature under changed local conditions. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions fur­ nished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole organic Fig. 16.—Pterodactyl (Wing-finger). world ; therefore the study of butter­ flies—creatures selected as the types of and frivolity—will valued any known past or present birds, but as airiness the most importantsome day beof bio­ one of branches represents a transitional type, having both logical science.”—- Naturalist on the Amazons, bird and reptile-like characters. In PP- 347-48. �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH Europe. The plants and animals of the British Isles in Jurassic times probably resemble those still found in Australia, which, by reason of its long isolation from other continents, has pre­ served in its pouched mammals, its mud-fish, and its cycads more ancient 35 has gathered, forming the flints which occur in limestones of all ages from the Silurian downwards. Molluscs, nautiluses, belemnites, ammonites, some of them the size of a cart-wheel, swarmed in its waters ; and with them the huge reptiles of Jurassic times, sea-lizards and Fig, 17.—Archaeopteryx. A, Fossil, showing tail and leg, from specimen in the British Museum (South Kensington). B, Head from Berlin Museum. (Both reduced.) C, Archaeopteryx restored. life-forms than any other country, per­ haps New Zealand excepted. The vast chalk formations of the globe are the typical features of the Cretaceous period, when the sea overspread a large part of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, receiving on its floor the foraminiferal shells which were converted into chalk, and the skeletons of sponges and other organisms round which silica sea-serpents, also ganoids and sharks ; and, what is important to note, bonyskeletoned fish allied to the salmon, herring, and perch families. In the North American formations, which have so largely added to our knowledge of ancient life-forms, “dragons of the prime,” crocodile-like, bird-like, and bat-like, are found ; also toothed birds, with reptile-like brains, and the �36 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH remains of true birds, these last being rare in the Old World. Little trace of the Cretaceous land-areas remains, but the plants of the upper strata resemble 4. Tertiary.—Those warm climates continued far into the Tertiary epoch, but they were followed by declining temperatures, which at last resulted in the long and intermittent period of intense cold known as the Glacial epoch. Large areas of Europe and North America were then swathed in ice, which gouged and moulded the subsiding land, choking the sea with ¿ZVzzA, and destroying numberless species of plants and animals, to the lasting biological impoverishment of after times. In the end the tempera­ ture gradually rose to its present level. The Tertiary epoch marks the begin­ ning of the present order of things, and of the existing distribution of land and sea, as also the uprising of most of the great mountain chains. Although much of the existing land­ area was then submerged under shallow seas, the sites of the great continents of both hemispheres had well-nigh the same outlines as now. Varied as are the life­ forms of that epoch, unrelated and, save existing vegetation, as angiospermous exogens, or leaf-bearing trees having a true bark, and growing from the outside, with their seeds enclosed in a vessel. They are called “ exo­ gens ” in contrast to “ endogens,” or palms, grasses, and lilies, which have no true bark, and grow by additions from the inside. Of the total thickness of the stratified rocks, estimated at one hun­ dred and thirty thousand feet, the Secondary sys­ tems occupy only fifteen thousand, or less than one-ninth of the whole. But their importance, like that of later and thinner formations, is not to be measured by the space which they fill, since it is during their deposition, when, Fig. 19.—i, Fossil Perch ; 2, Fossil Salmon. as the coal seams and coral deposits of extreme northern zones in the nummulitic limestones, detached, show, warm climates prevailed, that the as are the strata, those life-forms manifest marked advance in specialisation of a gradual approach to existing species and a marked divergence from theplant and animal forms is manifest. �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 37 species of older epochs. The colossal the Eocene strata, prominent among reptiles of Jurassic and Cretaceous times, which are the vast beds of limestone laid the coiled ammonites and other mollusca down when Europe, its north-west corner of their seas, are extinct. The age of excepted, and Central Asia, were covered huge reptiles has given place to the age of by the sea; when the rock from which mammals, with their intermediate forms, the Sphinx was to be hewn was being but with no one group dominant, and formed; and when the two Americas with no important group unrepresented. were partially submerged. These beds Larger animals have always been less extend from the Pyrenees to China and able to resist changes than smaller Japan, and also largely compose the animals. When the particular conditions Alps, Carpathians, Himalayas, Atlas, which enabled them to attain to a great and lesser mountain chains. Not many size have altered, they have been the first noble nor mighty are called to the en­ to perish. It is the smaller, nimbler, and during tasks of nature. It is the larger-brained animals that adapt them­ minute agents, unresting and widespread, selves to changed conditions; hence that have been the efficient causes of their long time-range compared with that of animals of unwieldy Structure and small brains. And while the big reptiles of the Second­ ary epoch, like the big plants of the Carboniferous system, have left only dwarfed representatives, it is from the persistent smaller types that the higher mammals are descended. The links between the Second­ ary and the Tertiary epochs are, except meagrely in the United States, unrepresented by any known strata, denudation having swept away the intermediate de­ of Nummulitic posits with their contents. And Fig. 20.—Fragment Great Pyramid. Limestone from the so confused are the Tertiary strata that their order in time is determined much that is grandest in earth-structure ; solely by the proportion of their shell­ and it is of shells of the coin-like numfish to existing species, ranging from mulities that these stupendous formations as low as three per cent, in the are mainly composed. Their foundations oldest beds to ninety-five per cent, were laid in archsean times in the fissures in the newest. Mollusca have been opened in the crust by volcanic action. called the alphabet of palaeontology, Into these fell the sediment and organic because their extensive distribution deposits of ancient seas, which ultimately, through the several epochs renders them as the cooling crust caved-in by its own the most valuable and trustworthy of all weight upon the shrinking hot nucleus, organic remains in assigning the order in were squeezed and puckered and over­ time and the conditions of life, not only turned by lateral pressure into number­ of their own species, but of other species less folds ; or, according to a later theory, whose life-history is briefer, and whose plicated and bulged through the heat generated by the accumulation of sedi­ range is more limited. The rocks of the Tertiary epoch wit­ ment.1 Then, when the twisted and ness to widespread aqueous and volcanic 1 Mr. Mellard Reade’s Orig'n of Mountain action. This is specially noticeable in Ranges is an important contribution to a difficult �38 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH crumpled strata were upheaved above sea level, water and the powers of the air sculptured them into pinnacle and peak, into ravine and valley. So the big mountains, as we know them, are relatively modern; the lesser ones are the older, as longest subject to the wear and tear of eroding agents. Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn are not older than the Eocene marine clay on which London stands ; and the Righi, a fresh­ water shingle bed, is younger still. Broadly grouping the life of Eocene seas, we find large whales, teleost or bony-skeletoned fish in abundance, the persistent ganoids. Birds quadrupeds, carnivora, hornless deer, and hog-like forms of a type between the tapir and the horse—appear in large numbers. Among the most remark­ able fossils from North American beds are those of the ancestor of the horse, a creature about the size of a fox, with four hoofed toes on each foot, and in one form (Eohippus) with the rudiments of a fifth toe. A still more significant biological link is found in the lemuroids of the Upper Eocene (which belong to the Primates, or order of mammals including man and ape), possessing characters allying them to one or other of the hoofed quadrupeds then living. The plants, which were slowly dispersed over the northern hemi­ sphere from polar regions, were tropical in character, as shown by remains in the Thames delta and corresponding de­ posits. The like character applies to the flora of early Miocene (in 21.—Feet of Ancestors of the Horse (Equida}. which is included OliA, Orohippus, Eocene ; B, Anchitherium, Upper Eocene ; c, Hipparion, Upper gocene} times, which Miocene ; d, horse of Pliocene and Quaternary. The figures indicate the are represented by numbers of the digits in the five-fingered hand of mammals. only a patch or two are in the air; crocodiles and turtles of deposit in Britain. Timber trees, ever­ swarm in the shallows ;1 snakes and > greens, and water-lilies flourished within serpents make their appearance; the eight degrees of the North Pole, with mammals are no longer restricted to which Europe and America were con­ pouch-bearers, for the placentals—huge nected by way of the Faroe Islands, subject. The author contends that the earth’s Iceland, and Greenland, or of Behring cooling has not extended to such a depth as to Straits. The animals approximated make internal contraction a cause of mountain more nearly to those of the present, ranges. He regards them as due to sedimentation, save in the huge size of some of the whether organic or inorganic, accompanied by local change of temperature in the crust. The mammals, as of the mastodon and heaping up of the sediment produces a rise in other creatures allied to the elephant. temperature, which causes expansion in all direc­ Small rhinoceroses, hornless deer, tions. This is illustrated by the effect in the anthropoid apes as large as man, and, course of time on the lead lining of a sink, which, through alternate heating and cooling, probably, the ape-like ancestors of man gets bulged up in ridges. himself, appeared; the horse corre­ 1 “ More true turtles have left their remains in sponded more nearly to his modern the London clay at the mouth of the Thames descendant, the variation being that than are known to exist in the whole world.”— Sir R. Owen, Paleontology, p. 281. each foot had three toes, of which only �I THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 39 Fig. 22.—Stone Implements : Palaeolithic Age. oaks and vines, that had stretched from France to Greenland, and the remnants of whose volcanic chain, of which Hecla is the sole active relic, are extant in the Hebrides and the Highlands of Scotland and Wales, was submerged. Europe was thus severed from America, but Britain was left as a peninsula, the newly invading waters of the North. Sea dividing Scotland from Norway. ‘ On the other hand, the Eurasian continent was upraised in parts, leaving the deeper basins of the Black, the Aral, and the Caspian Seas as remnants of the shallow waters that had linked together the Baltic and the Persian Gulf, and also the Arctic and the Indian Oceans. Except in the larger species, which gradually died out, the hippopotamus alone among them surviving to this day, the quadrupeds varied little from those of the Miocene, the most remark­ able among the carnivora being fierce sabre-toothed felines. But for us the most interesting Pliocene relics are the scanty fragments of the skeleton of man, and the flints bearing marks of artificial chipping, which have been found not only in France, Italy, and Portugal,1 but, what is far more important, in the Pliocene gravels of California.2 For as it is agreed that the birthplace of man was in the Old World, probably, in the judgment of some authorities, in the Indo-Malaysian region, the time-range of the genus from which he is descended has to be extended to allow for his development and dispersion. Pliocene fauna and flora alike witness to a cooling climate. The life-destroy­ ing agencies are at work; the cold fingers of the ice-giant are being spread over the northern hemisphere to the fiftieth parallel of latitude, dinting and thirteen hundred species have been found in Switzerland alone. The Pliocene period ushered in great local changes in land and water dis­ tribution. The lofty ridge, clothed with 1 Cf. M. de Quatrefages’s Introdziciion a P Etude des Races Humaines, p. 91 (Paris, 1887) ; and, for opposite views, Professor Boyd Daw­ kins’s Early Man in Britain, pp. 90-92. 2 On the authority of Professor J. D. Whitney, U.S. Geol. Survey. one touched the ground. Birds and insects were abundant: of the latter, �40 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH rounding its surface, and leaving to this day the traces of their impress in the snow-fields and glaciers of Scandinavia and Switzerland. Glacial action swept away the northern flora, never to return, the existing vegetation being almost entirely Post-Glacial and of eastern origin. 5. Quaternary.—Upon the glacial deposits or boulder clays, only the most recent of which contain fossils, and than in himself, since only the scantiest remains of his fragile skeleton have been preserved. The roughly chipped stone tools and weapons with which he made shift have been found buried in ancient river gravels with bones of the mammoth or woolly-haired elephant, and other arctic animals, as well as with bones of temperate and tropical animals, probably witnessing to sharp alternations of climate. When the Fig. 23.—Mammoth, or Woolly-haired Elephant. these poor and scanty, rest the strata of the present geological epoch, the Quaternary, or Post-Tertiary, or Pleisto­ cene, as it is variously called. This is subdivided into the Post-Pliocene and the Recent, the former containing the remains of many extinct animals, as huge wingless birds and sloth-like mammals, and the latter the remains of none but existing species. The Post­ Pliocene beds furnish plentiful evi­ dence of man’s presence in Western Europe, although more in his works foundations were being dug for Drum­ mond’s new bank at Charing Cross the following fossils were found in the Pleistw cene gravels :—Cave lion ; tusks and bones of the mammoth; extinct Irish deer; rhinoceros; extinct oxen ; red deer, etc. Stone implements and rude works of art of a somewhat more advanced type have also been found associated with re-i mains of sub-arctic animals in limestone caverns. Man’s occupancy of Europe has been continuous since his migration thither, probably by way of Northern �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH Africa, in the remote period known as the pouch-bearers, bringing forth their Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, which, as- young immature, are less specialised ggaming the artificial shaping of flints found j than the placentals, bringing forth their fefcotftbertt England, may have been pre- I young fully developed; while here, also, ceded by an Eolithic Age. The succeed- the ascending grades are seen in Eatf periods into which prehistoric time is whales, ungulates, carnivora, monkeys, divided are the Newer Stone Age, the Age men. To all which the fossil-yielding rocks of Bronze, and, lastly, the Age of Iron, Ifeich merges into the brief and modern period embraced by the historian. In the foregoing rapid summary of the earth’s past zo­ ology and botany much of de­ tail has been left out for clearer presentment of the typical fea­ tures of each epoch, and of B the scale of life as an ascending scale. The older the rock the Simpler the life­ forms. The seaweed and the lichen, stemless and leafless, are lower than the club­ moss and the tree-fern; these are lower than the true timber tree, with its complex arrange­ Fig. 24.—A, Mammoth scratched on ivory, found in the Madelaine cavern ment of trunk, in the Dordogne. B, Fight between Reindeer ; scratched on slate. branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. The sponge, rooted bring their witness. Imperfect as is plant-like to the rock, is lower than their record, obscure as in certain cases the coral or the star-fish; these, are the causes of modification resulting crabs or shell-fish, the in the appearance of new types, the most highly organised of which are evidence as to ascent of life from the lower than the vertebrates, between the simple to the complex, and as to its several groups of which the ascents are succession, is overwhelming. There manifest in fish, reptile, bird, and was a time when the earth was devoid of mammal. And among these last there life, and we are very far from its “ pro­ are the lesser and the greater: the toplast ” beginnings in the earliest B* �42 THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH known organic remains, just as all species probably came into being long before we have any trace of them. But The history of the earth is written by fire and water ; its life-history by water alone. Fig. 25.—Stone Implements : Newer Stone Age. 1, flint arrow-head; 2, stone axe-handle; 3, flint knife; 4, bone harpoon; 5, bone needle ; 6, perforated horn ; 7, spoon for scooping marrow from bones. no evidence as to their first appearance that may be gathered from parts still unexplored is likely to alter the relative order assigned to the several types as compared with one another. The volcanic and other modes of igneous disturbance that have upheaved, depressed, contorted, and fissured its cooling crust are due to the internal energy manifest in the escape of pent up �THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH heat and in chemical action. The more potent agents of change in the visible crust, however, have not been from within, but from without. As the internal energy, derived from contraction of the hot nucleus, decreased, the energy derived from the sun became more effective, giving rise to changes wherein variations of temperature and the circu­ lation of air and water over the surface of the earth would come into play. It is to these—to the solvents of the atmo­ sphere and rain, to the driving wind, to water in its several states and move­ ments, whether of disrupting frost, grinding glacier, eroding river, or waves Table Epoch Primary or Palaeozoic (Age of Ferns and Fishes) or have probably been permanent from the remotest geological epochs, and the variations in land and water distribution, although enormous and unceasing, have been confined to certain areas. All the evidence furnished by the aqueous rocks, from the earliest primary to the alluvial formations of to-day, point to their tran­ quil deposition on the floors of relatively shallow seas, where they have been converted by pressure and other means into solid beds, entombing organic remains which give the key to their relative place. Then, on their upheaval above the sea, the eroding agents have begun their slowly levelling work, and Successive Appearance of Typical Life System (Earliest known Life-forms) Secondary Mesozoic of the 43 fokms. Animal Plant Laurentian Cambrian Silurian Eozocm Canadense (?); Foraminifera Sponges ; corals ; Crustacea ; shell-fish Huge Crustacea; the lowest known vertebrates (ganoids or armoured fish) Seaweeds; 1 club-mosses Devonian Carboniferous Permian Insects ; swarms of ganoids Land vertebrates (labyrinthodonts) R ep tiles 1 Ferns ; ealamites ; J cycads Triassic Immense reptiles ; sea-lizards ; marsupial mammals Immense bird-reptiles ; true birds 1 Bony-skeletoned fish ; large arpmonites ^Conifers ; palms (Age of Pines and Reptiles) Jurassic Cretaceous Tertiary or Cainozoic Eocene Miocene and Pliocene (Age of Leaf-forests and Mammals) Quaternary Huge placental mammals ; serpents ; nummulites I Trees, shrubs her bs True whales ; man-like apes 1 allied to existing j sub-tropical ' species (Glacial epoch intervening, and continuing into the—) Post-Pliocene Mammoth and other woolly quadrupeds ; man Arctic and temperate Recent or Historic Existing species Existing species and currents of the sea—that the fiveand-twenty miles and more of stratified rocks (for the same stuff has been used over and over again), with all the varied contour of the earth’s surface, are mainly due. Vast, slow, and continuous as are the changes, they occur within defined limits. The deep ocean basins, the lines or seams of the great mountain chains, 1 The discovery of the lowest mammalian forms in earlier strata than those containing birds seems opposed to the accepted order of succession, but there is considerable uncertainty as to the exact period of the first appearance of birds. the débris of lands, where life-forms have flourished and perished, have re­ turned to the waters whence'they uprose, to become once more “ the dust of continents to be.” And so “ the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ; and that which is done is that which shall be done : and there is no new thing under the sun.” Between the opposing agents of waste and repair, of upheaval and subsidence, with interplay of the organic in growth and decay, as in limestone ranges, coral isles, and coal­ beds, and the action of man himself on nature, the ancient earth is maintained from age to age mother of all living. �Chapter V PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 2. Vertebrates : I. PLANTS. Sea and other water- 1 Gymnospores, i.e. naked weeds (H/^r<?) J spores. Fungi .... Lichens .... Mosses .... Angiospores, Ferns and Horsetails i.e. enclosed spores. Club-mosses Gymnosperms, Pines and Palm Ferns i.e. naked seeds. (Many seed lobes.) Grasses, Sedges, Palms (One seed-lobe.) Angiosperms, i.e. enclosed seeds. Trees, Shrubs, Herbs (Two seed-lobes.) II. ANIMALS. i. Invertebrates, i.e. without backbone. sticky, monos, / Structureless, . . . V alike all over. Slight unlikeness of amoibe,\ parts ; always chang­ . . . | ing shape. Secrete shell or skeleton of lime from water. Foraminifera (Lat._/t>r-_ Show passage to amen, an opening) further unlikeness in I parts. Polycystina ^.polusA Secrete she]] or s]<eleton many ; and kustis, jfrom Water. a cyst)..................... ) Sponges. Coral animals, anemones,1 jelly-fish. Sea-lilies, star-fish. Worms; flat and cordor thread-like (unsegmented). Crabs, spiders, centipedes, insects; annulate or ring-bodied worms (segmented). Oysters, snails, cuttle­ fish. Connecting links between Invertebrates and Vertebrates : Balanoglossus, Sea squirts, Lancelets. Monera1 (Gr. single) . Amoebic1 (Gr. change) . 1 No fossils of these soft-bodied lowest forms exist. - Impressions of bodies only. A. Pisces. Fish of all kinds. B. Amphibia. Toad, frog. C. Reptilia. Serpent, lizard, crocodile, turtle. D. Aves. Birds of all kinds. E. Mammalia. 1. Monotremcs or one-vented egg-laying : duckbill; spiny ant-eater. 2. Marsupials or Pouched ; Kangaroo ; opossum ; Tasmanian wolf. 3. Placental (bringing forth mature young) :—Ant-eater, sloth, manatee; whales and porpoises ; horse and all other hoofed animals ; elephant ; seal, dog, lion, tiger, and all other flesh-feeders ; hare and all other gnawing animals ; bats ; moles and all other insect-feeders ; apes ; man. If the life-forms of the past somewhat baffle us by their scantiness and im­ perfectness, those of the present em­ barrass us by their abundance. But although the existing species of plants and animals are numbered by hundreds of thousands, and the tale is not yet complete, they are classified into a few primary divisions or sub-kingdoms repre­ senting certain allied types, of which the several species included in each sub-kingdom are modified forms. For example, olives and daisies are grouped as angiosperms because their seeds are enclosed within a seed-vessel; flies and lobsters, beetles and crabs, are grouped together, although somewhat loosely, because they are alike composed of �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 45 non-specialists; otherwise the significance of facts, in their relation and dependence, is missed, and the larger generalisations are swamped in a sea of detail, so that we cannot, as the phrase goes, see the wood for the trees. In the old division of the three kingdoms of nature into the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal, we were taught that stones grow; that plants grow and live; while animals grow, live, and move. But this no longer holds good, at least in respect of the lower life-forms. There are locomotive plants All things the world which fill and stationary animals. The swarm­ Of but one stuff are spun ; cells or zoospores which are expelled and this stuff, the basis of all life, the from some of the lower plants, as algae formative power, “ universally known and certain fungi, behave like animals, and yet essentially unknown,”1 to which darting through the water by the aid of the name protoplasm (Gr. protos, first; hairlike filaments called vibratile cilia, plasma, moulded) has been given, is a finally settling down and growing into semi-fluid, sticky material, full of num­ new plants. Other plants, as diatoms berless minute granules in ceaseless and and desmids, are locomotive throughout rapid motion. “ It is not a compound, life ; certain marine animals, as sponges but a structure 1 built up of compounds, and corals, are rooted to the spot where 2 consisting of the elementary substances they grow; while there are organisms carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which appear to be plants at one stage in very complex union.” They are the of their growth and animals at another essential elements, but a few others enter stage. Other marks of supposed unlikeness into the chemistry of life, with resulting slight differences in the incidental ele­ have vanished. It was formerly held ments in animals and plants. Moreover, that among the distinctive features of a fundamental unity of form and of animals are—(1) a sac or cavity in function underlies and pervades living which to receive and digest food ; (2) the matter, from the slime of a stagnant power to absorb oxygen and exhale ditch to the most complex animal; the carbonic acid ; and (3) a nervous system. differences between living things being But although nearly all animals, in virtue in degree, and not in kind. Therefore, of their food being solid, have a mouth although each genus, nay, in most cases, and an alimentary cavity, the lowest forms each species, needs for its complete are without these organs ; and although study the labour of a lifetime, it suffices plants, in virtue of their food being for the majority of us, grateful for the liquid or gaseous, need not that cavity, results which the zeal of specialists has there are some that have it. Not only achieved, to acquaint ourselves with the is the process of digestion apparent in essential characteristics which mark the the leaves of carnivorous plants, the hair­ main divisions of the twin sciences of like glands on which contain pepsin, but botany and zoology. If this is the only embryonic forms have been found to possible thing for. us, it is the one thing secrete a ferment similar to the ferment needful for all, whether specialists or in the pancreatic secretion of animals, by which they dissolve and utilise the 1 Sachs, p. 294. food-stores in their seed-lobes as com­ 2 Sir Henry Roscoe’s Presidential Address to pletely as food is digested in our til# British Association, 1887. distinct segments; boys and frogs, pigs and herrings, are grouped in the sub­ kingdom of the Vertebrata, because they alike possess an internal bony skeleton, the most important feature of which is the spine or vertebral column. And this classification is applicable alike to past and present organisms, there being throughout the whole series of fossil remains no form, however un­ like any existing living thing, that is not to be placed in one or other of the sub­ kingdoms. �46 PRESENT LIFÈ-FORMS stomachs. And although green plants, under the action of light, break up carbonic acid and release the oxygen, they do the reverse in the dark, as also in respiration; while the quasi-animal fungi which are independent of light absorb oxygen and give off carbonic acid. In the “irritability” of the sundew, Venus’s fly-trap, and other sensitive plants, still more so in subtile and hidden movements in plant-cells, we have actions corresponding to those called “ reflex ” in animals, as the con­ traction of the shapeless amoeba when touched, or the involuntary closing of a, Fig. 26.—Venus’s Fly-trap. bristles in triplets, which when touched cause the sides of the leaf to collapse and enclose the intruder. one’s eyelid when the eye is threatened, or the drawing back of one’s feet when tickled. The filament in the amoeba which transmits the impulse causing it to contract differs only in degree from the sensory nerves in ourselves which transmit the impression to the motor nerves, causing the muscles to act ; and since there is every reason for referring the contractile action of plants, i.e., their movements in obedience to stimulus, to like causes, the germs of a nervous system must be conceded to them. The minute observations of Darwin and his son into the large class of quasianimal movements common to well-nigh all vegetable life go far to confirm this. The highly sensitive tip of the slowly revolving root, in directing the move­ ments of the adjoining parts, trans­ mitting sensation from cell to cell, seems to “act like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” 1 In these and kindred vital processes, in the so-called sleep-movements of leaves and flowers, both regulated by the amount of light, apparently acting on them as it acts on our nervous system; in. the detection of subtile differences in light which escape the human eye, by plants; in the higher range of sensation which they manifest, as compared to some animals ; in their choice of food, and of the material of the covering which some of them secrete; in their general sensitiveness to external influences; even in the diseases which attack them, the study of which Sir James Paget has com­ mended to pathologists, we have the rudiments of attributes and powers which reach their full development in the higher animals, and therefore a series of fundamental correspondences between plant and animal which point to the merging of their apparent differences in one community of origin. In fine, that which was once thought special to one is now found to be common to both, and to this there is no exception. Not only is there correspondence in external form in the lower life-groups, but, fundamentally, plants and animals are alike in internal structure, and in the discharge of the mysterious processes of reproduction and of nutrition, although, as will be shown presently, this last forms a con­ venient line of separation. Notwith­ standing agreement in essential points of comparison, there is this difference to be noted, that while animals, the lower forms excepted, reach a given develop­ ment, the vast majority of plants do not, but continually put forth growing points, so that life goes on indefinitely, and is multiplied and distributed over large areas. The life of the higher animals is 1 Darwin’s Movements of Plants, p. 572. �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS indivisible and, as compared with the plant, brief, while cuttings or tubers from a single plant are taken without detriment to the vigour and duration of the parent life. Of course the difficulty of classifying vanishes in the higher forms ; the lowest plants are allied to the lowest animals, but the higher the plant the more it diverges from the animal, which is evi­ dence that in the succession of life the highest plants do not pass into the lower animals. Descent is not lineal, but lateral; the relations between the two kingdoms are represented by two lines starting from a common point and spreading in different directions (see diagram, fig. 62). Even “lower” and ‘ ‘ higher ” are relative terms; the organi­ sation of the amoeba is as complete for its purpose as is that of man for his pur­ pose, the modification in the complex forms being due to the division of functions which are performed in every part by the simple forms. The like does everything; the unlike does some things. Although the foregoing and number­ less other facts, together with the evi­ dence from continuity, alike forbid the drawing of any hard and fast lines, and involve the conclusion, to borrow Pro­ fessor Huxley’s words, “ that the problem whether in a given case an organism is an animal or a plant may be essentially insoluble,” there exists, as noted already, a broad distinction in the mode of nutrition. The plant possesses the mysterious power of weaving the visible out of the invisible, of converting the lifeless into the living. This it does by virtue of the green colouring matter called chlorophyll, which is found united with definite portions of the protoplasm mass, of which it is a modification, the exact nature being unknown. The water sup­ plied by the root and the carbonic acid which the plant absorbs through the numberless stomata or mouth-pores in its leaves or integuments are, when the sunlight falls upon them, broken up by 47 the chlorophyll,1 which sets free the oxygen, and locks together the hydrogen and carbon, converting this hydrocarbon into the simple and complex cells and tissues of the plant, with their store of energy for service to itself and to other organisms. Animals cannot do this; they are powerless to convert water, salts, gases, or any other inorganic substances into organic: they are able only to assimilate the matter thus supplied by the plant, nourishing themselves there­ with, either directly, by eating the plant; or indirectly, by eating some plant­ feeding animal. In other words, the plant manufactures protein from the mineral world, and the animal obtains the protein ready made ; the plant con­ verts the simple into the complex, and this the animal, by combining it with oxygen, consumes, using up the energy which it thereby obtains in doing work. So the plant is the origin of all the energy possessed by living things; but how it can convert the stable inorganic into the unstable organic, while the animal can­ not, we do not know. Structurally, the lowest animal is below the lowest plant, since it is a speck of relatively formless, colourless protoplasm, whereas the protoplasm of the lowest plant is visibly organised to the extent that it has formed for itself an outer layer or membranous coat called the cell­ wall. Broadly speaking, the vegetable character of yeast granules is deter­ mined by the protoplasm being en­ closed within a cellulose coat; and the animal character of the amoeba is determined by the absence of any such covering. A few years ago it was held that the plant-cells were so encased within the cellu­ lose wall as to be cut-off from each other, but recent discoveries prove that the protoplasm of the plant is con­ tinuous by means of threads or canals, 1 The formation of chlorophyll in complete darkness, but under sufficiently high tempera­ ture, has been observed in a few instances, as in the seed-leaf of some conifers and in the leaves of ferns. �48 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS thus breaking down the barrier which assumed a fundamental distinction between plants and animals. But while the animal, with a few exceptions, remained free to wander, and developed organs of digestion and motion, the plant, where fixed, perforce struck its structure of living things; “it marks only where the vital tides have been, and how they have acted.” 1 The lowest organisms consist of one cell only, and the higher consist of many cells, which, increasing in complexity or diversity of form adapted to their different functions at later stages, are modified into the special tissues, with resulting unlikeness in parts or organs, of which all higher plants and animals are composed. Every variation in structure is therefore due to cellular changes, and every living thing is propagated in one way or another by cells : by their self-division or fission; or by gemmation, i.e. throwing off buds; or by the union of like cells; Fig. 27.—Diagram of a Cell. or in more complex mode, by the /, protoplasm ; n, nucleus ; n’, nucleolus. spontaneous or aided union of unlike cells, as the sperm-cell of the male with tentacles into the soil for foothold, and the germ-cell of the female, giving rise developed a large surface of green leaf to a seed or egg from which grows off­ to take in the food which the wind and spring more or less like its parents. the water brought it. In changing the In both plant and animal the cell substance of its cell-wall into woody contents, although here again excep­ tissue it prevented the evaporation of the tions occur in some of the lowest food-carrying fluids, and gained that organisms, exhibit a rounded body called solidity and form of which man has the nucleus,2 which itself often encloses another body called the nucleolus, but the functions performed by both in cell de­ velopment are ob­ scure. That even this much is known of cell structure may awaken wonder when it is remembered that A B C we are dealing with Fig. 28.—-Structure of Cells and Nuclei. bodies for the most part beyond the A, cell from the marrow : /, protoplasm ; n, irregular nucleus. B, gland-cell : m, cell membrane ; /, protoplasm ; n, nucleus with convoluted filament. C, range of our unaid­ part of the filament greatly magnified. ed vision. Bacon availed himself in the use of timber truly says that “ the complexity of nature for the needs and arts of life. exceeds the subtilty of man ”; the Organ and function are developed infinite divisibility of matter is apparent together, and where function is not in the organic as in the inorganic. And localised there is no variation of parts ; 1 Huxley, in Brit, and For. Medico- Chirurgical life probably began in combinations xii. having no visible distinction of parts. Rev., 1853, the p. 14. are very large or long, 2 When cells And as the cell is the first step in visible nuclei are present in large numbers. (Sachs, p. organisation, it is the fundamental | 86.) �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS size counts for little : the oak and pine, the acacia and the rose, are lower in the scale of life than the thistle and the daisy;1 the elephant is one hundred and fifty thousand times heavier than the mouse, but the egg of the one is nearly as large as that of the other; and it has been calculated that if one molecule in the nucleus of the ovum of a mammal were to be lost in every second of time, the whole would not be exhausted in seventeen years. These molecules are the sufficing material media of transmission of re- Fig. 29.—Semi-Diagram of Ovum of Mammal. zp, membrane ; -vi, protoplasm filled with fatty granules ; gv, nucleus or germinal vesicle ; gs, nucleolus or germinal spot. semblances, both striking and subtile, between parent and offspring, and of the vast sum-total of inherited tendencies, good or bad, which are the product of no one generation, but which reach us charged with the gathered force of countless ancestral experiences. Born into life, man grows Forth from his parents’ stem, And blends their bloods, as those Of theirs are blent in them ; So each new man strikes root into a far fore­ time.2 A. Plants. Plants are divided into two main groups or sub-kingdoms : I. Cryptogams 1 See Grant Alien’s [Flowers and Their Pedigrees, p. 42. 2 Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna. 49 (Gr. kruptos, hidden ; gamos, marriage), or flowerless. II. Phanerogams (Gr. phaneros, open; gamos, marriage), or flowering. I. The Cryptogams are subdivided into — 1. Thallophytes (Gr. thallos, a shoot; phyton, a plant), comprising algae, fungi, and lichens. These have no leaves, stems, or roots ; many of them are onecelled. 2. Bryophytes (Gr. bryon, moss), comprising mosses and liverworts. These have leaves and stems, but no true roots. 3. Pteridophytes (Gr. ptens, a fern), comprising ferns, horsetails, and club­ mosses. These have stems, leaves, and roots. The feature common to the crypto­ gams is the absence of any conspicuous organs, i.e., true flowers, with stamens and pistils for the production of seeds or fruits. The simplest or single-celled plants increase by subdivision, each cell carrying on an independent life and re­ peating the process of division. But sexuality is manifest in plants very low down in the scale, the mode of repro­ duction varying a good deal in different species. In some cryptogams it is almost as complex as in the flowering plants ; but notwithstanding the different kinds of sexual organs, there is this fundamental resemblance between them, that the union of the contents of two cells, a male or sperm cell, and a female or germ cell, each of which is by itself incapable of further development, is essential to the production of the embryo or seed. The lowest cryptogams are congrega­ tions of simple fibreless cells united in rows, or gathered round one another, and spreading on all sides. At the bottom of the scale are the Alga, com­ prising some ten thousand species, from the microscopic fresh-water desmids, one-millionth of an inch in length, with their whip-like cilia the two hundredmillionth of an inch long, to the giant t sea-weeds or tangles, hundreds of feet �5° PRESENT LIFE-FORMS in length, that cover thousands of square miles of ocean. The green scum of stagnant ponds, the waving filaments in streams, the shell-coated microscopic diatoms that people the ocean, tinging its depths with olive-green, and whose skeletons form deposits hundreds of miles in length ; the rose and purple weeds that flourish in shallow seas, and are cast upon their shores, are all members of a group which is perhaps the most venerable of living things. For although their generally fragile forms have been fatal to their preservation as fossils, there is little doubt that the algse flourished in dense masses in primeval oceans, and were the chief, if not the sole, representatives of plant life on the earth during millions of years. Like the foraminifera and other low animal organ­ isms, they illustrate the persistency of the earlier forms, in virtue of their simplicity of structure, despite changing conditions ; whereas the more complex structures, by reason of the greater delicacy of their parts, earn less readily adapt themselves to altered surroundings, and therefore have a much narrower distribution both in time and space. Next to the algae in ascending order are those fantastic products of decay, the quick-growing, short-lived Fungi, animallike in their mode of nutrition, plant-like in their fixity, and through untold epochs the agents by which dead plants and animals are resolved into the inorganic, and made available to enter into new combinations. Next in order are the Lichens, which, it is now generally agreed, are composite plants, being a special kind of parasitic fungi growing on algae. These are widely spread, living, after the adaptive manner of simple forms, where nothing else can live; unwithered by the heat, unsmitten by the frost; re­ deeming the earth’s desolate places, from treeless desert flats far as the lines of enduring snow, where, like the mosses, they shine in hues of gold and purple; spreading their flowerless patches of richest colours in metallie-like stains over rock and ruin ; incrusting the trees with j tint of freshness or touch of age, with hoary fringe or mock hieroglyph ; and in their decay yielding rich soil wherein fern and flowering tree may strike root. In Mosses, whose glossy, many-coloured masses weave softest carpet over the earth, sharing in the service rendered by the humble lichens, the cells have be­ come developed into rudimentary root, stem, and leaf, manifesting still further transition toward unlikeness in parts which is due to division of function. But the structure is still cellular, i.e., there are no tissues and fibres. The mosses represent the intermediate forms between the lowest and the highest cryptogams, between the green algae, out of which liverworts were probably de­ veloped, and ferns, which arose out of liverworts. In Ferns, the larger number of cells have joined together to form fibrous vessels, lengthening or thickening in varying shape and texture according to the functions to be discharged by them, resulting in the woody tissue which enters into the structure of all the higher plants. The cells, thus converted into tissue, cease to grow; the formative protoplasm is always becoming the formed; ’tis “ an infinite dying, and in that dying is life,” since there is locked up in the compacted material a store of energy on which the higher organisms depend. The ferns and club-mosses and horse­ tails of the present day are the puny re­ presentatives of the stately and luxuriant, although sombre, flowerless trees that composed the dense jungles of green vegetation in the Devonian and suc­ ceeding Primary periods, during which our fossil fuel was chiefly formed. The existing palm-like vegetation of the tropics more nearly approaches its Devonian prototype, but it falls far behind it in abundance as well as in size. II. The Phanerogams have their flowers with stamens and pistils con­ spicuous, and are divided, according to the formation of their seeds, into— i. Gymnosperms, or naked-seeded, the �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS ovum not being enclosed within a seed­ vessel or ovary, but carried upon a cone, as in pines and allied species. The Fig. 30.—Diagram of a Flower. Ke, calyx ; K, corolla ; f, filament of stamen ; a, anther, showing pollen sacs open and pollen grains escaping ; F, ovary; g, style ; n, stigma, on which are pollen grains, one of which, p, is sending down its spermatozoid, ps, to the micropyle of the ovum, the central structure in F-, i is the integument of the ovum; S, the nucleus ; em, the embryo sac ; E, the germinal vesicle, close to the pollen tube near the micropyle. gymnosperms are the connecting link between the flowerless and the flowering plants. 2. Angiosperms, or cover-seeded, the ovum being enclosed within an ovary. This group is subdivided into (tz) plants having one cotyledon or seed-leaf, from which they are developed, as palms, lilies, orchids, and grasses ; and (¿) plants having two seed-leaves, as oaks, beeches, and all trees and shrubs not included in the foregoing. In naked-seeded plants the pollen or male element falls on the exposed ova; in cover-seeded plants it falls on the stigma, passes down the pistil into the seed-vessel, and enters the ovum through an opening in it called the micropyle, or “ little gate.” It has been ascertained that malic acid is the agent by which the spermatozoids are guided to the ovaries. Whilst the gymnosperms are, on the one hand, most nearly allied in the order of descent to ferns, the; sombre 5i flowers which they bear giving them only by strict botanical classification a place among phanerogams, they are, on the other hand, more complex in struc­ ture than the single seed-leaf plants, because their bark, wood, and pith are clearly defined, as in the double seed­ leaf plants. Their lowest representa­ tives comprise the cycads or palm-ferns, so called from their resemblance to palms, for which, with their crown of feathery leaves, they are often mistaken. Next in order is the much more varied and -widely distributed conifer family, notably pines, firs, and larches, and, lesser in importance, cedars and cy­ presses. A still higher class, various in its modes of growth, marks the transi­ tion to angiosperms, the flowers of both having many features in common. The single seed-leaf angiosperms have no visible separation of their woody stuff into bark, stem, and pith, and have no rings of growth, the wood exhibiting Fig 31.—Fertilisation of Ovum. A, section of ovum after fertilisation ; pl, placenta ; a, outer, and i, inner, integument; p, spermatozoid entering micropyle; e, embryo sac. B, apex of embryo sac, with eb, young embryo of three cells. C, same further developed. an even surface, dotted over with small dark points. Their leaves have parallel veins or “nerves,” as in the onion and tulip ; and the blossom-leaves, or petals, are most usually grouped in threes or �52 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS multiples of three. Among their several representatives we may single out the lilies for their beauty and fragrance, and the cereals for their value and import­ ance, both classes being in near con­ nection, since the grasses from which man has developed wheat, barley, oats, rice, and maize are, in a botanical sense, degenerate descendants of the lily family. The double seed-leaf plants include all the highest and most specialised varieties. Bark, stem, pith, and con­ centric rings of growth, by which the age of the plants may frequently be reckoned, are clearly defined ; the leaves are netted-veined, and the petals are most usually grouped in fours or fives Fig. 32.—Cycad (Australia). or multiples of those numbers. The lowest class, represented by the.catkin­ bearers, as the birch and alder, the pop­ lar and the oak, and by plants allied to the nettle and to the laurel, are nearly related to the highest gymnosperms. Next in order are the crown bearers, or flowers with corollas, as the rose family, which includes most of our fruit-yielders, from strawberries to apples j while the highest and most perfect of all are plants in which the petals are united together in bell shape or funnel fashion. Such are the convolvulus and honeysuckle, the olive and ash, and, at the top of the plant-scale, the family of which the daisy is the most familiar re­ presentative. Its position among plants corresponds to man’s position among animals. As he, in virtue of being the most complex and highly specialised, is at their head, albeit many exceed him in bulk and strength, so is the daisy with its allies, for like reasons, above the giants of the forest. The primary function for which the organs of plants known as flowers exist is not that which man has long assumed. He once thought that the earth was the centre of the universe, until astronomy dispelled the illusion; and there yet lingers in him an old Adam of conceit that everything on the earth has for its sole end and aim his advantage and service. Evolution will dispel that illusion. But our delight in the colours and perfumes of flowers will not be lessened, while wonder will have larger field for play, in learning that the coloured leaves known as flowers, to­ gether with their scent and honey, have been developed in furtherance of nature’s supreme aim—the perpetuation of the species. For that alone the flowers blossom and the fruits ripen. And truly the contrivances to secure this which are manifest in plant-life are astounding, even to those who perceive most clearly the unity of function which connects the highest and lowest life-forms together. It is difficult to deny the existence of a rudimentary consciousness in the efforts of certain plants to secure fertilisation. For example, in a well-known aquatic plant, Vallisneria spiralis, the male flower with its matured pollen is detached from the stem and rises to the surface, where, as it floats, it comes into contact with and fertilises the ovary of the female flower, whose stalks then contract and carry the ovary to the bottom, where the seeds can ripen in safety. Most flowers are hermaphrodite, i.e., have their male and female organs within the same petals, and in some cases fertilise themselves by scattering the pollen from the bursting stamens on the stigma or head of the pistil. But nature is opposed to this; “ tells us in the most emphatic manner that she �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS abhors perpetual self-fertilisation,”1 with its resultant puny and feeble offspring; and we find a number of contrivances to prevent this, and to secure fertilisation •by the pollen of another plant, to the abiding gain all round of the plant, whose blood, as we may say, is thus mixed with that of a stranger. Con­ sequently, the most effective mode of reproduction is that in which two individuals are concerned. All organisms in which the sexes are separate have descended through many gradations from hermaphrodite ancestors, and it is to this division of function between male and female that not only a more I 53 naked-seeded groups whose sombre flowers are borne on dull brown cones ; and, among cover-seeded groups, grasses and rushes with their feathery flowers, and willows and birches with their long waving clusters of catkins. All of these provide against the fitfulness of the wind, which is as likely to blow pollen one way as another, by producing it in large quantities, so that it sometimes falls in thick showers, covering wide areas. Plants which are insect-fertilised attract their visitors by secreting honey and developing coloured floral organs. The way in which this came about is probably as follows. Fig. 33.—Fertilisation of Flower (Meadow Sage) by Insect. a, calyx ; b, curved upper lip ; c, under lip, on which the bee stands while sucking the honey ; d, pistil ; d’pistil at a later stage ; e, stamen ; Z, stamen shedding the pollen from its anther qn the back of the bee; f bee’s proboscis wherewith it reaches the honey. The common idea about flowers is vigorous offspring, but also progress among the higher animals, is, in the first that they are made up of petals and instance, due. Were there no sex there sepals, whereas the essential parts are the would be no social instincts, no love, no stamens and pistils, i.e. the male or dependence, no unity. This, however, pollen-producing organs, and the female or seed-containing organs. The earliest by the way. Two agencies are unwittingly con­ flowers consisted of these alone, having cerned in the fertilisation of plants— no coloured whorl of petals within insects, and the wind “ that kisses all it another coloured whorl of sepals, and meets ” ; while in the dispersion of the were only scantily protected by leaves, as matured seed, birds and other animals, are many extant species. These the and again the wind, play an important food-seeking insects then, as now, visited for the sake of the pollen, to the detri­ part. Plants which are wind-fertilised have ment of the plant, which lost the fertil­ no gaily coloured petals or sepals, and ising stuff and gained nothing in return. do not secrete nectar. Such are the Besides the pollen, most plants secreted the sweet juice called honey, especially when in the act of flowering, 1 Darwin’s Fertilisation of Orchids, p. 359. �54 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS for the nourishment of the blossom. This juice was often stored in nectaries near the seed-vessels, where the insects could not get at it without covering their bodies with some of the pollen, which they unknowingly rubbed on the pistils of the plant next visited, and thus fer­ tilised the ovum, provided that the plants were nearly related. Honey being sweeter to the taste than pollen, the plants that produced most honey stood the better chance of repeated visits from insects, and therefore of fertilisation, to the manifest advantage of their species over others. Thus, as first shown by Conrad Sprengel in 1794, there were developed in the course of long ages intimate relations between the two, and also .marvellous contrivances to secure the visits of welcome insects of a certain form and size, and to prevent the intru­ sion of unwelcome insects, as well as to arrest the washing out of pollen by rain or dew. For as plants are rooted to one spot, they cannot act on the aggressive. They have to develop defensive structures to resist attacks of devouring enemies: hence their thorns, prickles, spikes, hairs, nauseous taste, and the like. Some plants have an eel-trap sort of arrange­ ment of the hairs at the base of their petals to retain the desired honey-seeker till the pollen is rubbed on it, when the hairs relax and release it. Others have become specially adapted to certain in­ sects by secreting the honey at the bot­ tom of a tube (nearly afoot long in some rare orchids), and the insect has developed a correspondingly long proboscis to reach it. The one aim of all these modifications of structure is to economise the pollen and ensure its use for fertilisation, to the advantage of the plant in the struggle for life. Still more were those plants favoured on which spots or patches of colour appeared, attracting the eye of the insect, and developing through its agency into tinted petals and sepals, which have changed the earth’s once flowerless meadows into fields of cloth of gold. Both petals and sepals are modified I or transformed stamens, which have ex­ changed their function ofpollen-producers for that of insect-allurers ; and as both stamens and pistils are leaves aborted or modified for the special function of repro­ duction, Wolff’s generalisation that the leaf is the type or fundamental organ of the plant has a large measure of truth in it. But before speaking further about colour­ development in plants it may be useful to say a little about colour itself. Since everything is black in the dark, and moreover has no colour in itself, it follows that colour is in some way a property of light. Now light, which is itself invisible, is due to vibrations or minute waves set up in all directions by Fig. 34.—Transition from Stamen to Petal in White Lily. any luminous body—whether the sun or a rushlight—in the ethereal medium which pervades all space, and is com­ posed of rays of different refrangibility, i.e., change of direction in passing from one medium into another, say from the ethereal medium to the denser atmo­ sphere. White light is due to the com­ bination of all these rays, w’hich range through innumerable gradations of colour from red to violet, and it is to the absence of one or more of them that the infinite variety of colours is due. If a body is quite opaque, or otherwise so constituted as to absorb none of the rays, it appears white; if it absorbs them all, it appears black; if it absorbs green, blue, and violet, and not red, it appears red; if it absorbs red, orange, and violet, and returns or reflects green, it appears green. The colours �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS which bodies reflect are therefore regu­ lated by their structure; the way in which their molecules are arranged de­ termines the number and character . of the light vibrations or ether waves which are returned to the eye, and which rule the colour we see. For example, char­ coal and the diamond are both pure carbon; the dull opacity of the one and the trembling splendour of the other are solely due to the arrangement of the several molecules of each. It is thus obvious that any change in the nature or structure of a thing is accompanied by change in its colour, and to this cause the various pigments in plants are to be referred. All growth involves expenditure of the energy which the plant has stored within itself, and which becomes active when the hydrocarbons combine with oxygen, resulting in cellular change, and appearance of other colours than the green of the chlorophyll. Thus may be explained the colour of sprouting buds and young shoots, the more or less in­ tensified colours of leaves and flowers, and the lovely tints of autumn ; one and all being due to oxidation, the minutest changes inducing subtile variations in colour. As the stamens of most flowers are yellow, the earliest flowers, being derived from stamens, were probably yellow also; and all subsequent changes in colour take place in a regular order, yellow passing into white or pink, and then through red and purple into blue, but never in a reverse direction nor in any other order.1 Whichever plants made most show of colour would the sooner catch the eye of insects, however dim their perception of the difference in colours might be, and would thus get fertilised before plants which made less display. Thus have insects been the main cause in the propagation of flowering plants, the plants in return developing the colour sense in insects. The flower nourishes 55 the insect; the insect propagates the flower. Other contrivances to meet the need for fertilisation might be cited,. as the markings upon the petals to guide the insect to the nectary; the exhalation of scent by inconspicuous flowers, as mignonette, or by such as would attract visitors at night, as the night-smelling stock ; but enough has been adduced to show that the chief, if not the sole, function of flowers is to attract insects, and thus secure cross-fertilisation. Nor does the provision stop here. The fertilised seed is not left to chance, but, like the fertilising pollen, is entrusted to secondary agents, to the care of the birds and the breezes. Where not scattered by the bursting of the ovary it is winged with gossamer shafts, as in the thistle and the dandelion, and floated on gentlest zephyr or rushing storm to a genial soil. Such wind-wafted seeds, like wind-fertilised flowers, are rarely coloured; neither are the seeds of the larger trees, since their abundance ensures notice by food-seeking animals ; nor are the nuts which are protected by shelly coats. But other seeds enwrap themselves in sweet pulpy masses, called fruits, whose skins brighten as they ripen and attract the eye of fruit-loving birds and beasts.1 The seeds pass through their stomachs undigested, and are scattered by them in their flight over wide areas. As with the brightest hued and sweetest scented flowers, so it is with the brightest and juiciest fruits; they sooner attract the visitors whose services they need, and thus gain advantage over less favoured members of their species, developing by the selective action of their devourers into the finest and pulpiest kinds. And, as Grant Allen shows in his delightful and exhaustive book on the colour. sense, the origin and development of this sense in the sub-kingdom which includes man 1 “ Birds are much influenced in their choice of food by colour, for, though white currants are much sweeter fruit than red, yet they seldom touch the former till they have devoured every 1 Colour of Flowers as illustrated by the bunch of the latter.”—White's SelborHe, “ ObBritish Flora, pp. 17-60, by Grant Allen. J servations on Birds. ” (Macmillan.) �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 56 is due to the same cause, man being descended from a fruit-eating animal “who shared the common vertebrate faculty of colour perception and the common frugivorous taste for bright hues.”1 The subject is of course closely connected with the evolution of the sense of beauty, which, at first evoked by things connected with physical needs, was developed by leisurely contemplation of natural forms, colours, and groupings. B. Animals. All animals fall into two main groups : the structureless, or one-celled, called Protozoa ; and the many-celled, called Metazoa. The several types upon which they are constructed are usually classed under the following primary divisions, called gub-kingdoms :— ' Protozoa (Gr. firotos, first ; zoon, animal) Ex. Moneron, amoeba Coelenterata (Gr. Hollow-bodied koilos, hollow ; entcron, bowel) <D > fl Simplest forms Ex. Sponge, polyp, ane­ mone, coral builder Echinodermata (Gr. cchinos, a hedgehog ; derma., skin) Ex. Sea-urchin, star-fish body-cavity; the Coelenterata, which have a body-cavity ; and the Coelomata, including all animals, from echinoderms to man, which have a digestive cavity separate from the body-cavity. Any consecutive arrangement can only broadly indicate the relative order of the several life-forms, because development has not proceeded in direct line—eg., the ant, which belongs to the Arthropoda, is the highest of all invertebrates ; but it is not therefore most nearly allied to the lowest vertebrate. As will be shown later on, the connecting link between invertebrates and vertebrates is to be found in such animals as the remark­ able worm-like Balanoglossus ; the bottle­ shaped sea-squirt or Ascidian (Gr. Spiny-bodied Annelida (Lat. Joint-bodied annulus& ring), and Arthropoda (jointed-footed) Ex. Worm, crab, spider, ant Mollusca (Lat. mollis, soft) Soft-bodied Ex. Sea-squirt, (but usually pro­ oyster, snail, tected by a shell) cuttle-fish Vertebrata (Lat. vertebra, joint) Back-boned Ex. Fish, and all other higher life­ forms to man Tabular forms are convenient for clear presentment, but their hard and fast divisions are apt to be mistaken for real lines of separation, whereas the several sub-kingdoms merge one into the other, like the colours of the rainbow. As further reducing the number of types, animals may be divided into three grades : the Protozoa, which have no 1 The Colour Sense (Triibner & Co.), p. 221. B Img. 35-'—Monera, without nucleus. A, show­ ing pseudopod. B, process of fission. asktdion, a leathern bottle); and the head­ less lancelet. If we go back far enough, we find the common starting-point of all, whence they travelled for a while along the same road, and then diverged wider and wider apart, until it now seems diffi­ cult to believe that the lowest and highest, both of plant and animal, are one in community of origin. 1. Protozoa. The lowest member of this group—in other words, the lowest known animal, if we except certain parasites—is the moneron (Gr. monos, single). Like the lowestplants, it lives in water, the element in which life had beginning. It is an extremely minute, shapeless, colourless, slimy mass, alike all over, and therefore without any organs. When we say that it is alike all over, we mean that our range of vision does not enable us to �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS report otherwise, for doubtless the simplest and smallest living thing is very complex in structure. And we mean, further, that there is no differen­ tiation, as it is called, z.<?., no formation of specific organs for the performance of specific functions. The functions of living things are threefold—nutrition, reproduc­ tion, and relation; in other words, to feed, to multiply, to respond to the outer world ; and all these the organless moneron discharges. Every part of it does everything ; it takes in food and oxygen anywhere, and digests and breathes all over its body. Like the happy peptician of whom Carlyle tells, it “ has no system.” It literally “ gets out­ side” its food, having the power of throwing out blunt finger-like prolonga­ tions, called pseudopods or false feet, with which it propels itself and spreads over its prey, sucking the soft body even from shelly creatures, and casting away the refuse. So far as the function of nutrition, which includes digestion, circulation, and rejection of waste, and the function of reproduction, are con­ cerned, the moneron performs these as completely as the highest animals. For these, with their complex sets of organs —lungs, heart, stomach, &c.—cannot do more than nourish themselves and keep the body in health ; very often they cannot, through folly or misfortune, do that. And in reproduction, which the moneron effects by dividing itself into two (as do the lowest plants, wherein, as in it, there is neither male nor female), it accomplishes in simple fashion what the higher life-forms can do only in a more complex way. So that the difference—and this only in degree, not in kind—between a slime­ speck of protoplasm and the higher organisms is in the discharge of the function of relation. Reference has been made to the response to stimulus from external things manifested by the lowest life-forms, al­ though there is no trace of a nervous system in them ; and now that we are treating of a living mass that not only 57 feeds and digests and breathes all over, but likewise feels all over, a few remarks upon the function and origin of nerves may supersede the need for any detailed account of the several nervous systems in the representative animal types. The function of the nerves is to bring the organism into relation with its sur­ roundings ; they are the special media of communication between the body and the external world, and between the brain and every movement of the parts of the body. Starting in the higher animals from the encased brain and ensheathed spinal cord, and diffused in the lower animals in less complex ar­ rangement, they report from without to within. The vibrations of the ethereal medium that affect us as light enter the eye and pass along the optic nerve, which conveys the impulse to the brain, and it is the brain, not the eye, that sees. So with the air-vibrations that travel along the aural nerves, the sensation of sound resides in the brain, not in the ear ; so with all the manifold sensations that we feel. The unity of the sensations is fundamental; the differences lie in the vibrations. The correlation of the senses, as we may term it, is shown in the familiar trick of getting a blindfolded person to tell whether he is drinking port or sherryj or whether the pipe he is smoking is alight or not. Wherever there is sensitiveness to im­ pressions, however dim and feeble this may be, there the function of relation is being exercised. This sensitiveness is exhibited by the moneron in its shrinking when touched, and in its grip of food; but the sensitiveness is diffused, and not located in any organs. In members of the same sub-kingdom there are faint traces of approach to nerve-structure, and the development of this is manifest in ascending scale, till in the highest life-forms among certain invertebrates, as ants, and vertebrates, as man, it reaches subtlest complexity. Now, as every part of an organism is made up of cells, and as the functions govern the form of the cells, the origin �58 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS of nerves must be due to a modification in cell shape and arrangement, whereby certain tracts or fibres of communication between the body and its surroundings are originated. But what excited this modification? The all-surrounding medium, without which no life had been, which determined its forms and limits, and touches it at every point with its throbs and vibrations. In the beginnings of a primitive layer or skin exhibited by creatures a stage above the moneron, unlikenesses would arise, and certain parts would by reason of their finer structure be the more readily stimulated by, and the more quickly responsive to, the ceaseless action of the surroundings, the result being that an extra sensitiveness along the lines of least resistance would be set up in those more delicate parts. These, developing like all things else, by use, would become more and more the selected paths of the impulses, leading, as the molecular waves thrilled them, to structural changes or modification into nerve-cells and nerve­ fibres of ever-increasing complexity as we ascend the scale of life. The entire nervous system with its connections; the brain and all the subtile mechanism with which it controls the body; the organs of sense, with their mysterious selective power—the olfactory organs, probably the earliest developed, so acute in man as to detect the presence of the onethree-billionth of a grain of mercaptan (sulphuretted alcohol), and yet coarse by comparison with the antennae of insects; the eye, to receive and sift vibrations travelling twelve million miles in a minute; the ear, with its three thousand strings of Corti, each vibrating in response to a particular sound-wave; the organs of taste, guarding the entrance to the digestive canal and refusing ad­ mittance to contraband food—alike begin as sacs formed by infoldings of the primitive outer skin. In contrast to the eyes of the invertebrates, the sensitive elements of the eyes of vertebrates are formed from a paired outgrowth of the fore brain. The brain, trillion-celled seat of sensation, arose from the infoldings sinking down beneath the surface and finally becoming embedded in other tissues; the eye and the ear, as their parts developed, were joined from within by outgrowths from the brain. Such, in fewest words, is that theory of the origin of nerves which, formulated by Herbert Spencer, has been confirmed by all recent biological research.1 Development by cell-modification ap­ plies to the body throughout—to bone, to cartilage, and sinew, as well as to the myriads of nerve-tissues, varying between the fifteen-hundredth and the twelve­ thousandth of an inch in breadth, that keep us in touch with the universe. But, easy as it is to dissect and describe the nervous mechanism, the nature of the connection alike between nervous impulse and consciousness in a man, and between sensation and contractile action in a moneron, remains an insoluble mystery. What has been said concerning the diffused sensitiveness of the lower animals adds force and suggestiveness to the fact that the plant limited the action of the outer world upon it when the protoplasm enclosed itself within a wall of cellulose. This isolation, or lessened susceptibility to the vibrations of air and ether, to changes of temperature, and a thousand­ fold subtile influences, the animal escaped by remaining mobile, and setting up no barriers between itself and its environ­ ment. A short step upward from the moneron brings us to the Amoeba, so called from its constant change of shape as it pro­ trudes and withdraws the pseudopods. It shows approach towards unlikeness in parts in the modification of the proto­ plasm into a membranous skin at the surface, and in a nucleus near the centre, with an expanding and contracting cavity. for distributing food and oxygen in the body—a primitive apparatus for digestion and circulation. Therein the beginning of a distribution of labour, leading to 1 Cf. 400-4. Balfour’s Comp. Embryology, ii. pp. �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS cell-modification into organs, is illus­ trated. The white corpuscles in the red blood of man and other animals are called “ amceboids ” because they are like the amoeba in structure, size, and movements, changing their shape, living Fig. 36.—Amoebae (highly magnified), an independent life, and even taking in food. Some of the lowest amoebae secrete, like the diatoms among plants, solid matter from the sea, building for them­ selves primitive organs of shelter and defence in the shape of exquisitely formed chambered shells pierced with holes, through which the soft body flows and the pseudopods are pushed for capture of food. Some form their skeletons of lime, others of flint, pos­ sibly evidencing to the possession of a selective power or dim sentience by even the minutest creatures; and, as shown already, it is of these skeletons that vast deposits are composed. Still more marked advance towards unlikeness in parts is manifest in the Infusoria., so called because readily 59 developed in infusions of exposed vege­ table matter, where they crowd by myriads in the space of a water-drop. Instead of the pseudopods of the moneron and the amoeba, we find vibrating filaments or cilia, by which supplies are swept into the body, which is furnished with a rudimentary mouth and short gullet, through which the food and oxygen pass to the body-cavity. 2. Coelenterata. The “ hollow-bodied ” animals are made up of two layers of cells more or less modified. But they are still of low organisation, one evidence of which is that, like the Protozoa, they have no vital parts, and that there is no separate canal for absorbing food and carrying away refuse, the mouth still opening direct into the body-cavity. The lowest members of this sub-king­ dom are the Sponges, They were long regarded as colonies of amoebae, and therefore classed among Protozoa, but fuller knowledge of their structure as many-celled organisms, some of the highest among which show slight traces of nerves and sense-organs, has caused them to be ranked in a division called Porifera (Lat. porus, a pore ; and fero to bear). Very lovely are the skeletons which some of them secrete, such as Venus’s flower-basket, with its graceful fretted spirals ; but more familiar to us are the useful fibrous and porous domestic sponges, woven of material said to be chemically allied to that spun by silk­ worms. Being rooted to one spot, the sponge-cells have become specially modified for ingathering food and oxygen. Only the cells on the outside of the horny or flinty skeleton can procure food and oxygen easily; those living in the inside effect this by means of cilia, the whip-like action of which drives the water, charged with food and oxygen, through the innumerable canals, whence, having served its purpose, it is driven out through other canals, carry­ ing the refuse of the colony with it. The whole sponge represents, as has been �6o PRESENT LIFE-FORMS aptly said, a kind of submarine Venice, “ where the people are ranged about the streets and roads in such a manner that each can easily appropriate his food from the water as it passes along.” Cilia also cover extensive surfaces of the higher animals. They abound about the eyes, the ears, the windpipe, and the brain of man ; mysteriously moving own account—are found clinging mouth downwards to weeds and rubbish in fresh water. From the mouth hang a number of tentacles containing cells, in which lie barbed threads coiled up in a poison-fluid. When anything touches these tentacles they contract, the cells burst and fling the thread, lasso-like, around the prey, poisoning it with the fluid. From some of the mar­ ine species which secrete tubes of flint, and project themselvestherefrom like flowers, so that the sea depths are cov­ ered with their waving, plant­ like forms, the buds detach themselves and become the beautifullytinted Medusae or jelly­ fish. These pro­ duce eggs which become rooted polyps, so that the offspring never resembles its parents, but always its grand­ parents. All living matter is largely made up Fig. 38.—Structure of Sponge. of water, the A. Vertical section of outer layer magnified 75 times. /, pores or openings of canals for conducting water, which flows to a, sacs ; e, canal for expulsion of average propor­ water ; early stages of spores. tion ranging B. Sac transversely divided (800 diameters), showing sponge-particles with cilia. C. Sponge-particle highly magnified. cilium; m, collar; w, nucleus; c, con­ from seventy to tractile vesicle. ninety per cent., independently of any other part, even of but in the jelly-fish it is about four the nervbus system, but fulfilling much hundred to one. Yet, fragile as is less important functions than in the the creature, its structure is complex. bodies of the lower animals. Canals traverse the swimming-bell, and Next in rank above the sponges are carry food and oxygen to every part; the tiny cup or tube-shaped, jelly-like, rudimentary muscles in the shape of green-hued (because chlorophyll-contain­ contractile tissues propel the animal ing) polyps named Hydra, colonies of along in rhythmic grace of motion; a which, with their bud-like clusters of nervous system runs round the margin young—soon to start in life on their of the bell; there are rudimentary eyes �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS in bead-like pigment-spots, and rudi­ mentary ears in small sacs along the margin ; and the hanging tentacles are Fig. 39.—Ilydra. A. Planula or earliest stage of a hydroid on its emission from the egg. B. Thread-cell undisturbed. C. The same with the filament protruded. charged, as in its fresh-water ally, with deadly fluid. Lovelier still, and of slightly more complex structure, are the variously Fig. 40.—Jelly-fish. coloured Sea-anemones, with their petal­ like tentacles ; while nearly allied to these are the colonies of Coral-builders, which, despite the surging wave and drifting current, raise their tree-like structures, foundations of solid land on which the bird builds her nest and man sets his dwelling. 3. Echinodermata. This division includes all rayed animals, the skin being hardened by the m, mouth ; in', primary cavity; in.', secondary cavity ; e, ectoderm or outer skin ; e', endoderm or inner skin ; t, tentacle ; ovary ; rf, disc of attachment; j, body-cavity. secretion of jointed or leathery plates, or of spines or hedgehog-like prickles. In some, as the star-fish, the rays spring from a common centre ; in others, as the Sea-urchin, they are coiled to form a globular body; in the Sea­ lilies, which abounded as far back as Silurian times, but which are now limited in range, they spring, flower-like, from the end of a fixed stalk; in the slug-like Sea-cucumbers, which possess the power dys­ peptics may envy of throwing away the inside of the body and growing it anew, the skin is tough, the limy matter being secreted in scattered spicules. The echinoderms show marked advance towards un­ likeness of parts in having a digestive canal shut off from the body-cavity, affording special provision for nutrition. This is effected by a number of canals which communicate with the outside of the body, and through which the sea water is driven by cilia, as in the sponges. The water is also pressed from the canals into numerous little �Ô2 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS suckers, by which the animal crawls along—nature’s first essay in locomotion on solid ground. There is a distinct nervous system, the fibres of which in the star-fish run along each ray, at the the digestive canal of the sea-cucumber, are differences of degree and not of kind. They are one and all due to cell-modifi­ cation arising out of advance from the like to the unlike, from the simple and general to the complex and special, from the organless to the organised; and any addition to the bare details given above would only bring the more pro­ minently into relief the fact of an indissoluble, underlying unity. 4. Annelida and Arthropoda. The gradations between the infinite variety of life-forms are nowhere sharply marked, and this has led to the grouping of large numbers under one sub­ kingdom, as in the case of the ~ ----- Fig. 42.—Coral. The left side of the figure shows the coral denuded of soft parts" on the right the animal matter is shown, while at the upper part several of Very miscellaneous animals lonP" the polyps are seen projecting. . / - , , _ ________ inn lit A 1 included together as Annulosa (Lat._ annulus, a ring) because of the division of the body (which is developed from three layers of cells) into more or less well-defined rings or segments. It is also, like the body of vertebrates, bilaterally symmetric­ al, i.e., double and correspondent, so> that if it were split lengthways the two' halves would be seen to be almost exactly alike. The nervous system, which runs along the belly, con­ sists of two fine cords, knotted at different points into ganglia or masses of nerve-cells, the first pair of gan­ glia being above the gullet, so that the Fig. 43.—«, Sea-cucumber ; b and c, young stages of the same. cords which join the invertebrates. The differences between second pair form a collar round it. the secretions of limy matter by the The important part which the mouth amoeba and by the sea-urchin, between plays as the. immediate channel be­ the contractile action of the moneron in tween the animal and its surroundings every part and the localisation of nerve­ accounts for the development of the function in the medusa and the star-fish, higher organs of communication near it ; between the vacuole of the amoeba and the anterior or front segments most tip of which is an eye having about two hundred crystal lenses, and a primitive eyelid in the form of a filmy covering. Thus far an intimate relation may be noted between the life-forms of the �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS completely undergo concretion, and in this way the portion that carries the mouth, the chief nervous centre or brain, and the sensory organs, as eyes, ears, antennae, is formed. Hence the position of the head or skull, as the pro­ tecting structure round the more special­ ised parts, is ruled by the position of Fig. 44.—Diagram of Annelid Animal. A. a, digestive canal; b, heart; c, nervous system. B. Nervous system enlarged, showing double cord and ganglia. the mouth. The heart, which is tube­ shaped, lies along the back, and the digestive canal lies between the heart and the nervous system. This arrange­ ment distinguishes both earth-worms and wasps, leeches and crabs, centi­ pedes and beetles, lobsters and ants— in fine, all but the very lowest classes. But the advance in complexity of structure—in other words, in division of labour—is especially shown in the more elaborate arrangements for the conveyance of nutrition throughout the body as compared with that exhibited in the lower sub-kingdoms : eg., in the moneron food and oxygen enter at any and every part • in the amoeba they are driven throughout the body by means of a pulsating vacuole; in the polyp they are brought by the water which flushes it within and bathes it without; in the sea-urchin and the star-fish the nutriment is carried by canals in their bodies which com­ municate direct with the water. In the higher organisms the oxygen and food are circulated by a more highly organised fluid called blood, which carries them to every part, and like­ wise removes the waste and effete 63 matter, the immediate motor power by which the blood is driven through the body being the heart. The aeration of the blood—in other words, the supply of oxygen and the removal of carbonic acid—is effected by its passage through the respiratory organs. Only the back­ boned animals breathe through the nostrils, the lower animals breathing through pores or sacs in their sides, which subdivide into, countless tubes. But this grouping of animals so variously modified in structure, however fundamentally related in type, in the sub­ kingdom Annulosa, has been abandoned, especially as it included a number of primitive unsegmented forms. In fact, the term itself is given up by the best authorities, who are, however, by no means agreed as to the mode of classification to be substituted. For the purposes of this section, the life-forms ranging from worms to insects may be divided into the Annelida or footless, comprising worms and leeches ; and the Arthropoda or footed, compris­ ing crabs and other Crustacea, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and all insects. The jointed organs of locomotion known as limbs, and which have been developed Fig. 45.—Section of Second Segment of Worm. a, outer or skin layer; b, dermal connective layer ;_c, muscle plates ; d. segmental organ ; 7z, arterial blood ; z, venous blood; intestine ; n, ovary. from muscle fibres, are arranged in pairs. The Vermes, or worms, are very heterogeneous, and a distinction has to be made between the unsegmented and segmented (see Table, p. 44). The former include the flat or ribbon-like, and thread-like forms, of which a vast number live as parasites outside or inside the bodies of nearly all animals, passing, in some cases, from one animal �64 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS to another, in curious changes, man breathing Arthropoda, i.e. of all insects, having his full share of them, while spiders, and myriopods.” It has the earth-worms, marine worms, and leeches appearance of a black caterpillar, and are the leading representatives of the sometimes is more than three inches in segmented. The interest in the struc­ length. It is provided with a single ture of the JNemertines, or ribbon­ pair of small, simple eyes, with horn-like worms, has greatly increased of late, antennas, and with a double pair of horny because “ certain points in their jaws. It has seventeen pairs of short, organisation appear to indicate a re­ hook-clawed feet, and it breathes air by mote degree of relationship to the means of tracheal (or wind-pipe like) ancestral forms which must have tubes similar to those of insects. “ It preceded the Chordata, appears probable that we have existing to which the vertebrate in Peripatus almost the earliest stage in the evolution of tracheae, and that these animals also belong.” 1 This is perhaps the air-tubes were developed in the first most convenient place tracheate animal out of skin glands scat­ to make reference to tered all over the body. In higher the isolated Rotifers, so- tracheate animals the tracheal ooenings called because of the ceaseless wheel-like movements of the cilia round the mouth. These degenerate specks, many Fig. 47.—Peripatus. of which are visible to the naked eye, are high­ have become restricted to certain definite ly organised. They have positions by the action of natural selec­ a nerve ganglion which tion.” The sexes are distinct in Peri­ sends out threads to the patus. Its antiquity “is proved by its ruby eye or eyes and wide and peculiar distribution. It js antennae; they have jaws found at the Cape of Good Hope, in and teeth, often a hard Australia, New Zealand, Chili, the skeleton; the females Isthmus of Panama, and the West have one and sometimes Indies. If its horny jaws were only two stomachs, but the larger they would no doubt be found Fig. 46.— poor male has none. fossil in strata as old as the Old Red Common Rotifer. They can remain for Sandstone at least.” 1 a, mouth ; b, eye­ The typical form—head, thorax or spots ; d, chewing or­ years in a state of sus­ chest, and abdomen or belly—of the gan ; alimentary pended animation.2 canal ; b, developing The Arthropoda in­ numerous varieties of the widely diffused embryos ; t, anus. clude the remarkable Crustacea, or hard-shelled class, whose worm-like Peripatus ; the Crustacea three-lobed ancestors, the trilobites, (lobsters, crabs, shrimps,&c.); Mynopoda flourished in the seas of the Cambrian (centipedes, millepedes); Insecta ; Arach- and later periods, is the same, with infinite modifications in detail, as that of nida (spiders, scorpions, mites, &c.). Peripatus is “ regarded as an animal of the Insecta and Arachnida. But in the very highest importance and antiquity, Insects these three divisions are sharply and is believed to be a nearly-related marked, the chest, to which the legs and representative of the ancestor of all air- wings are attached, and the belly, being sometimes joined by a mere thread, 1 Zool. Articles from the Ency. Brit., p. 83 whence the name given to that class, (1891). 2 Cf. Hudson and Gosse’s magnificent mono­ graph, The Rotifera, pp. 9, 139 (Longmans). 1 Moseley’s Notes by a Naturalist on H.M.S. “ Challenger," pp. i37~8 (edit. i892)- �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS Insecta, “ cut into.” The aquatic origin of insects is certain. Their wings have been developed from organs which were adapted for breathing in the air as the necessity arose, and they ultimately became organs of flight when the creature left the water for the land. Here, as in *5 proportioned by the size of the thing which arouses it. For the infinitely small is as fully charged with mystery as the infinitely great; the movements Fig. 49.—Nervous System of Beetle, showing double nerve-cord and chain of ganglia. of forces and energies in both cell and crystal are more complex than the motions of the giant bodies of the heavens; the ultimate analysis of the atom is more elusive than that of the mass which it makes up. In the beauty and delicacy of insect structure—notably in the wings, more perfect for flight than those of birds; in the infinite division of organs; the spider, with its six hundred teats, spin­ ning its web of as many strands ;1 the Fig. 48.—Generalised Insect (Grasshopper). a, head ; b, eye ; c, antennee ; d, thorax ; e, foremost pair of legs; f, middle segment of thorax ; g-, fore­ most pair of wings ; h, second pair of legs; z, hind­ most segment of thorax ; j, second pair of wings ; k, femur of third pair of legs ; I, tibia (corresponding to shin-bone); wz, tarsus (flat part of foot); ab, ab­ domen. of the water winning in the struggle for life. The larger number of animals pass through well-marked series of changes, but these take place within the egg;, the food-store of which suffices for their development. Through lack of this supply most insects quit the egg in an immature condition, passing through the metamorphoses of grub, chrysalis, and imago. Like the rotifers, they rebuke the vulgar notion that bigness is greatness, and that wonder is to be Fig. 50.—Section of Eye of Insect. dragon-fly, with its twelve thousand eyes., each with its own lens, cone, and rod ; the caterpillar, with its fifteen hundred air-tubes—we learn that magnitude is not necessary to complexity. In the high 1 At the Melbourne Observatory a breed of spiders is kept, the strands of whose webs are used for micrometers. C �66 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS nervous organisation of insects, and the variety of functions, many of these quasi­ human, which some of them discharge; in the dexterity of their actions, and the manifest adaptation of means to ends ; in the social order of certain species, notably the ant commonwealth, with its division of labour, its slave and fighting popu­ lation, its farmers and miners,1 its nurseries for pets and weaklings, its burial customs, its political and industrial order, which has not, like ours, to re­ adjust itself by peaceful or bloody revo­ lutions to changing conditions—we have striking evidence of the interrelation of all living things and of the unreality of the distinctions which man has set up between instinct and reason: in fine, evidence of fundamental correspondence between the nervous systems of the lowest and the highest. Complexity, not size ; mental, not physical power, mark advance in the organism ; and it is in the special­ isation of the nervous system, and in the proportion of its controlling centre, the brain, to the rest of the structure, that the mechanical explanation of intelli­ gence lies.1 Darwin remarks that the 2 brain of an ant, which is proportionally larger than that of any other insect, al­ though itself not so large as a quarter of a small pin’s head, “is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.” 3 There is much force in the argument that the long period of infancy, with its consequent dependence on parental love and care, through which man, and, in lesser degree, the highest apes and other animals, pass, has tended to develop the feeling of sympathy and of its expression in service of the helpless by which the 1 Cf. Bates’s Amazons, pp. 350-360, on forag­ ing ants. 2 In the cockchafer the proportion of brain to body is 1 to 3,500 ; in the worker bee, 1 to 174; in the whale, 1 to 3,000 ; in the chimpanzee, I to 50. But, as evidenced by the large brain of the porpoise and the dolphin, the convolutions, more than the volume of brain, are the measure of capacity. 3 Descent of Man, p. 54, 2nd ed. family is knit together, and out of which has grown the social instinct which forms tribes and nations. Nor does the argument stop here. The longer the baby stage, the more intelligent is the animal; for where there is a complex nervous system its specialisation goes on after birth, whereas in the case of an animal with low capacities all the nervous connections are formed before birth, so that it begins life in lusty independence, fully equipped for work, and therefore with no tie to bind it to its parents, while its isolated life is fatal to mental develop­ ment. Now the ant, with other communal insects, as bees and wasps, has to pass through a relatively long grubhood, and in this we may have the explanation of its high social organisation, which has had measureless time for its develop­ ment, since the remains of Hymenoptera are found as far back as the Jurassic Age. And if the argument has any force in the case of man, the evolutionist is bound to apply it to the ant, with the important difference that the limits*of the ant’s development were reached long ago, the capacity to change varying inversely with the persistence of inherited qualities. But in the highest members of the Arthropoda we arrive at the extremity of one branch of the life-tree, and we must descend to reach the starting-point which leads us to the loftier branch whose topmost twig is man. 5. Mollusca. This sub-kingdom, the importance of whose fossil remains has been indicated, includes a wide range of organisms, any common definition of which is difficult. Many of them appear, like the fallen angels, not to have “kept their first estate ”—as, e.g., the lowest class, which resembles polyps, and was formerly erroneously grouped with them. In the larger number of molluscs symmetry of form is more the exception than the rule. Some Mollusca have neither heads nor hearts, or at least quite imperfect �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS ones ; others have heads and chambered hearts; some grow together in colonies, others live an independent life; but all are alike soft-bodied, lacking segmented or jointed structure. Some, as the sea and land slugs, are naked, although furnished with a delicate shell when young; others have a leathery or gristly covering; the rest, the shell-fish proper, are protected by single or double valves, which in their spiral forms and fadeless colouring sometimes surpass the loveliest flowers, or which, as in the pearl oyster, yield the lustrous substance which recent research has shown is due &7 which is so abundant as to colour the surface of the Arctic seas for leagues, has no less than 360,000 suckers for capture of its prey attached to the wing­ like organs which spring from its head. The lowest molluscs are the plant­ like, fixed Sea-mats and Sea-mosses; the highest are represented by the Briareuslike Cuttle-fish, from the common species of our seas to the octopus, with its rudi­ mentary internal skeleton and its chame­ leon-like power to change its colour; and by the pearly Nautilus, the sole survivor of an ancient family that swarmed in the waters of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Between these range the more familiar shell-fish, notably the oyster, which, in common with all bivalves, is headless; and the periwinkle, whose land congener is the air-breathing snail. 6. Vertebrata. We now reach the last and highest of the divisions of animal life, the sub-kingdom of the back-boned^ which in­ cludes man. Professor Cope says that “ the simplest expressions a, anus ; b, abductor muscle ; c, heart ; d, nerve ganglia ; e, adductor muscle ; mouth ; g-, stomach; ti, gills; z, intestine surrounded by which shall cover all organs liver. The tubes marked by arrows are the canals of the siphon. The are the solid segment, the water enters by the lower and leaves by the upper tube. hollow sac and tube.” 1 The to a tape-worm whose larvae invades back-boned animals witness to this; the oyster, which thereupon encrusts they have fundamentally the same the parasite. The power of secreting organs and parts as earth-worms, pass­ matter from the surrounding water for ing through the same grades of struc­ the construction of their shells is one of ture. But while all invertebrates, ex­ the most persistent characteristics of the cept the lowest, consist of a single Mollusca, the shells (which are not cast tube or cavity containing the nervous periodically, as with the Crustacea) being and vascular systems in common, and formed along the surface of the thick have an outside skeleton, which is flexible skin called the “mantle,” the simply a hardening of the skin, verte­ crumpled line of which determines their brates consist of two tubes or cavities, shape. They range in size from the the smaller of which encloses the enormous Tridacna of tropical seas, central parts of the nervous system, or which sometimes weighs five hundred the brain and spinal cord, and the other pounds, to the minute species of our the vascular system, or the organs of coasts, thousands of which scarcely ex­ digestion and circulation, and have an ceed an ounce in weight. One species, the Clio borealis, about an inch long, 1 Origin of the Fittest, p. 185. �68 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS inside skeleton. The most important part of this is the spine or back-bone, which separates the tubes, and is made up of a number of jointed bones or vertebrae, united by remains of the cartilaginous notochord, which give flexible action to the whole column. The advantage of this combined strength and ease of movement is seen in fishes as they dart through the water, in the gliding of the snake, the leap of the antelope, and the spring of the lion; while, as compared with animals which are either naked, or covered by a rigid horny skeleton, cumbersome as the chest, and belly, characteristic of Crustacea and insects, is, however, more obvious. The limbs never exceed four in number, and are in pairs, whether as fins of fish (not reckoning the unpaired fins as limbs), wings and legs of birds and bats, fore- and hind-legs of quadru­ peds, or arms and legs of man; all being modifications of one type, as in the prolonged bones of the bat’s wing, , which correspond to our fingers. Such, in crude outline, are the prin­ cipal features of the highest animals, but no general description can cover the infinite variety of vertebral forms. The armour of our ancestors, vertebrates have an enormous superiority in their internal framework of living bone, which adapts itself to, as well as nourishes and protects, the softer parts. Vertebrates, like the Annelida and Arthropoda, are bilaterally symmetrical, and are com­ posed of segments placed one behind the other; but the lines of junction have become hidden by overlying muscles or effaced by structural modifi­ cation—as, e.g., in the formation of the skull, which is composed of nine or more coalesced segments. The three­ fold division of the body into head, sturgeon and the shark have a gristly spine; the frog has no ribs ; the tortoise is encased in a shield composed of the hardened skin of its back and belly; and even in the marked division of verte­ brates into cold-blooded, embracing fish and reptiles, and warm-blooded, em­ bracing birds and mammals, exceptions occur in warm-blooded fish, as the tunny and the bonito. But no differences in detail can obscure the fact that verte­ brates are all modifications of a common type, the variations in structure being due to differences of function determined by unlike modes of life. Moreover, �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS details obscure relations ; and since it is with the relation of all life-forms that we are chiefly concerned, we may pass to further evidence of connection between the highest invertebrate and the lowest animal of vertebrate character. This is furnished by the marine worm Balanoglossus, because it is shown to possess gill-slits like sea-squirts and lancelets, and to develop in early life a short notochord.1 Of perhaps greater interest to the evolutionist are the transparent bag-shaped Sea-squirts, or Ascidians, which were formerly classed by them­ selves under Tunicata (Lat. tunica, a cloak). Most of the species are im­ mobile, attaching themselves to rocks, shells, and other objects, sometimes growing separately, and sometimes in colonies on a common stem. Of the 69 consisting of a single ganglion, lies be­ tween the mouth and vent. The position of this ganglion gives a valuable clue to the connection between the ascidians and the vertebrates, but still more im­ portant evidence as to this is supplied in the early stages of the ascidian’s development. In certain species the egg gives rise to a larva resembling the tadpole of a frog, both outwardly and in­ wardly—a resemblance “ reaching abso­ lute identity when we examine the way Fig. 53.-—Balanoglossus.2 two openings in their gristly covering, which is largely made up of cellulose, a characteristic element in plants, one is the mouth and the other the vent. The mouth opens into a breathing sac, fur­ nished with numerous gill-slits and cilia, and leading through the gullet to the digestive organs—stomach and intestine —which are connected by a sharp bend with the vent, whence the inhaled water, after giving up its oxygen to the blood, is expelled. The heart, a tube-shaped organ, is placed at the lower end of the body-cavity, which fills the space around the intestine. The circulation forms a remarkable exception to that of every other known animal, the current being reversed after the heart has beat a certain number of times. The nervous system, 1 See Professor Ray Lankester’s art. “Verte­ brata,” in Zoological Articles contributed io the Ency. Brit. (1891). 2 This illustration and that of Peripatus (p. 64) are, with the kind permission of Mr. John Murray, copied from Thomson’s Study of Animal Life. Fig. 54.—Sea-squirt. a, mouth ; b, vent. in which the various organs arise from the primitive egg-cell,” the only im­ portant difference being that the ascidian has but one eye. In connection with this Mr. W. B. Spencer’s important dis­ covery of a small eye beneath the skin on the top of the head of the Hatteria lizard in New Zealand, the representa­ tive of reptiles whose fossils occur in the Trias, may be noted. The larvæ of the ascidian and of the frog alike possess four structures which are common to every back-boned animal at some stage of its development, and the possession �70 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS of which is explicable only on the theory of the descent of sea-squirts and verte­ brates from a common ancestor. These four structures are—(i) the throat with its gill-slits ; (2) the primitive back-bone —a gristly rod called the notochord developed from the alimentary canal, which is found in no invertebrates a, mouth ; Z, vent ; c, gullet-opening ; d, nerve-ganglion ; e, stomach ; yj test or outer layer ; g, tunic or inner layer ; h, branchial sac. the fish-like form to the amphibian, ex­ changing gills and tail for lungs and limbs, and, in fine, epitomising in its development the series of forms through which its ancestors passed, the other fixes itself by suckers to stone or plant. Tail, notochord, nerve-cord, and eye disappear, the brain remains small, the throat enlarges, the gill-slits increase in number, the skin becomes hard and leathery, and the eyeless, footless thing sinks, as its manufacture of cellulose markedly shows, well-nigh to the plant level, its vegetating mode of nutrition sealing its degeneration. The old classification of Vertebrates started with the lancelet (so called from its lance-like shape), or Amphioxus (Gr. amphi, both; and oxus, sharp, both ends being nearly alike). The mouth of this headless, one-eyed, semi-trans­ parent animal has cilia for driving in the food-carrying water, and opens through the breathing slits into a wide gullet, in which the water, after giving up its oxygen to the colourless blood, enters, and is expelled at the vent. There being no muscular heart, the blood is circulated by contractions of the vessels. Now this boneless creature is classed among back-boned animals because it has the primitive gristly notochord from which the spine is developed in all true except the ascidians; (3) the brain and spinal cord; and (4) the eye, which is inside the brain. In all invertebrates which have eyes the retina or sensitive part is developed from the outer skin, and its outgrowth from the brain in vertebrates is ingeniously accounted for by Professor Ray Lankester1 on the theory that the original vertebrate was a transparent animal, through every part of whose clear skin the light passed and acted on the tissues of the inlying brain. But as the ; g, respiratory organs ; skin became tougher and a, mouth ; t, c, heart ; d, liver ot, spinal marrow ; o, tailA-/, digestive canal ; Z, notochord ; fin. denser, and functions con­ sequently more localised, the eye-bearing vertebrates. Above this rod lies the part of the brain had to grow outwards nervous system, composed of a single till skin-vesicle and brain-vesicle met, cord, which bulges slightly as a primitive brain near the mouth. The short noto­ and the eye was formed at the surface. Similar as are the larvae of the tadpole chord and single nerve-ganglion of the and the sea-squirt, they diverge at later ascidian correspond, as far as they go, stages. While the one advances from to like organs in the lancelet ; and if 1 Cf. Degeneration, pp. 47-49, Nature Series they were lengthened, so as to run along the whole of the back of the ascidian, the (Macmillan). �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS positions in the two animals would be found to agree exactly. This certainly points to their common descent. Fishes, as the least specialised verte­ brates, although by no means so stupid as is commonly thought, are placed in the lowest class, many species, as sharks, rays, and sturgeons, representing in their gristly back-bones, uneven tails, and spiny or plated skins, the armoured ganoids which mark the gradations between cartilage and bone in structure. All fish, breathe by means of gills, the Structure of which varies a good deal in the different orders, but are essentially the same in having like functions to discharge.1 Just as we had to retrace our steps in search of a link between vertebrates and 7i the paired fins into limbs,1 those of the mud-fish being thong-like, and those of the jeevine being jointed, for locomotion on land. Other fish, as eels and the climbing perch of India, can also leave the water, their breathing being effected by modification of the gills. Here, then, we find another inter­ mediate step between land-dwellers and water-dwellers, the most perfect and familiar example of which is supplied by the common frog’s life-history. The gill-breathing, limbless, tailed, plant­ eating, aquatic tadpole develops into the lung-breathing, four-legged, web-footed, tailless, animal-eating, amphibian frog, unable, save when torpid, to live in water without coming to the surface for air. Some amphibians possess both Fig. 57.—Mud-fish. invertebrates, so we must again go back a step or two to find the inter­ mediate forms between aquatics and amphibians. These forms, the evolu­ tion of which is probably due to their occasional exposure to the atmosphere, developing in them different organs of breathing, are represented by certain fishes called Dipnoi, or “double­ breathers,” because, while they have gills for taking up the oxygen from the water, they can also breathe on land by means of the air-bladder or sound, which thus dis­ charges the functions of a lung. Such are the mud-fish of the Amazons, and the jeevine of Australia, both of which show tendency towards modification of 1 In his Naturalist in North Celebes (1889), Dr. Hickson gives an account (p. 30) of certain Jumping fishes which breathe mainly by the tail, the greater part of their lives being spent with head and gills out of the water. lungs and gills throughout life, but all the higher vertebrates, whether they live in water or not, breathe through lungs, which arise, like the air-bladder of fishes, as sac-like outgrowths of the primitive gullet. Reptiles, which include forms as diverse as the nimble lizard, the sluggish croco­ dile, and the limbless snake, are for the most part the relatively insignificant descendants of the monsters of the land, air, and water, that flourished in the Age of Reptiles amidst the dense vegetation of a swampy world, until con­ ditions fatal to them, and favourable to the development of more plastic life­ forms, supervened. Birds, at the head of which our best 1 Cf. Professor Ray Lankester’s preface to Gegenbaur’s Comp. Anatomy, p. xi, “ On the Origin of Limbs.” �IM­ PRESENT LIFE-FORMS authorities place the crow family, possess a number of special characters, chiefly connected with the power of flight, from the path of which Roman augurs drew their omens of good or evil, as do the Papuans of to-day. Their exact sequence in the development of vertebrates is un­ known, but their descent from reptiles is certain. Not, as might be thought, from the flying species, for these were feather­ less, and more like bats than birds in the membranous wings which stretched from limb to body, but from species that walked upon the land. But, although structural likenesses between birds and reptiles survive to attest this former close relation—as, eg., the union of the skull to the spine by a single joint, instead of by two joints, as in most amphibians and in all mammals, and the union of the skull to the jaw by the quadrate bone, which enables the jaws to be opened very widely—manifold causes, working through long periods, have brought about marked differences of external and internal structure. Nota­ ble among these is the modification of the three-chambered heart of nearly all reptiles into the four-chambered heart of birds and mammals, by which the fresh and used-up blood are kept separate, and the higher temperature of the body is maintained. The scales of the one, and the feathers or downy covering of the other, are alike modifications of the outer skin; for although the interme­ diate stages between the plumage of birds and the horny plates of reptiles are missing in fossil remains, it is certain that these and kindred structures, as hairs, claws, nails, and hoofs, are all out­ growths of the skin. Even teeth, the variety of form and arrangement of which render them of great value in determining the habits and general struc­ ture of the animal to which they be­ longed, are secreted from the skin. It has been shown already that the nervous system and sense-organs are also formed from the skin ; nor should the variety of function which it discharges, and there­ fore the variety of structure into which it is modified, surprise us when we re­ flect how continuous has been the action of the medium with which it is in imme­ diate contact upon the external surface of all organisms, so that the slight film or integument of the lowest has deveA Fig. 58.—Growth of Hair. A. Hair-rudiment from an embryo of six weeks, a, horny layer of cuticle ; b, mucous layer of cuticle ; c, cells of the future hair ; d, basement membrane. B. Hair-rudiment with the young hair formed, but not yet risen through the cuticle. C. Hair protruded. loped into the complex layers which enclose the highest. Space prevents more than bare refer­ ence to the varied and helpful material furnished to the evolutionist by birds, and to the significant evidence of their development as compared with their reptilian ancestors in larger proportion of brain to body, with the intelligence which this connotes. A remarkable proof of this may be seen in the wide �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS range and method of their migrations, involving powers of vision and memory exceeding that possessed by man. On this instinct, about which we know very littlSj but which probably had its origin in the search after food, Darwin remarks, “ How a small and tender bird coming from Africa or Spain, after traversing the sea, finds the very same hedgerow 73 one-vented. These quasi-mammals are represented by the ornithorhynchus,1 or duckbill, a beaver-like creature with a horny bill, the feet being furnished with both webs and claws; and by the echidna, or spiny ant-eater, which re­ sembles a large hedgehog, being snouted and covered with prickles. Each is found in Australia, that land of primi- Fig. 59.—-Duckbill. in the middle of England, where it tive forms, and recent discoveries invest made its nest last season, is truly mar­ them with the greatest importance as links in the chain of mammalian descent. vellous.” interesting to note that in the For they both lay eggs like reptiles and oldest known picture in the world, a birds, the duckbill laying two at a time, fresco in the Boolak museum at Cairo which she deposits in her underground taken from a tomb dating about 3000 nest, and the echidna laying one, which B.C., three species of geese are depicted, is probably hatched in her pouch. And two of which are so well drawn as to be the eggs further correspond with those of birds and reptiles in containing not readily Identified. The lowest members of the diversified -only the protoplasm from which the group of Mammals or milk-givers re- embryo is formed, but also the food-yolk seffibie birds in being toothless, and in 1 Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, the older natur­ having a common sac into which the in­ alists named it ; for when they were assured testines and other organs open, for which that the creature was not a fraud of the staffer, reason they are called Monotrernes, or they thought it must be a freak of nature. C* �74 PRESENT LIFE-FORMS on which it is nourished until hatched, when it lives on the milk obtained from the mammary glands in some way not yet fully ascertained. Now an animal that unites in itself these reptilian and mammalian features is to be classed among the interesting anomalous and intermediate forms which Darwin has happily termed “ living fossils.” Whether monotremes are descended in direct line from reptiles, with the internal structure of which they have much in common, and mammals from monotremes, or whether there was an ancestral form or rootstock from which both reptile and mammal branched off, so that mammals island continent, and to lands similarly long isolated. In all other mammals the young are born fully formed, being attached during the time of their development within the mother to a structure called Xhe placenta, through which they are nourished by her, whence the general term placental mammals, of which the insect-feeders appear to be the primitive type. Start­ ing thus more or less fully equipped in the struggle for life, the chances in their favour were incomparably greater than those of animals which are precariously hatched or born in an imperfect state; hence, among other causes, the Fig. 6o.—Spiny Ant-eater. in, marsupial bones. are as old as reptiles and older than birds, is not clear, although the rocks may one day reveal it. But the inter­ relation of reptiles and mammals is proven beyond question. The next stage in mammalian de­ velopment is marked by the Marsupials, or pouched milk-givers, as kangaroos and opossums, the young of which are born in an imperfect condition, and nourished and kept in the mother’s pouch till they can run alone. Their fossil remains evidence a wide range in Triassic times, and the Post-Pliocene beds of Australia yield bones of marsupials as large as elephants ; but their habitats are now limited to that dominance of the placentals, and their development into the highest organisms yet reached. They are usually divided into the following classes, which indicate structural characters common to the animals included under each, and not the exact relative place of the class in the sub-kingdom. No linear arrange­ ment of classes, nor even of species, is possible, for the succession of forms is not as that of steps of a ladder, but as of a many-branched tree. (See Fig. 62.) 1. Toothless {Edentala) . Sloths; ant-eaters; armadillos. These show affini­ ties linking them nearer to monotremes than to marsupials (The term �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 75 ■educed from diagrams of the natural size (except that of the gibbon, which was twice as large as nature). (From Professor Huxley’s Mails Place in Nature, Frontispiece.) RACES OF MAN. Tuft-haired variety . . Fleece-haired variety . . < Woolly-haired. (Nearly all long-headed/ I I f I Papuans Hottentots Kaffirs Negroes Australians Malays Chinese Tatars Primitive Man. . ' Stiff-haired variety . Dapps Straight-haired. (Nearly all broad-headed ; I but the Esqui- * maux and Aus­ tralians are long-headed) ' { . Curly-haired variety . . k Native American f Arctic . ' Dravidas . . . { ( ( Nubians . . . ( . Turks Hungarians Esquimaux Greenlanders Hyperboreans Nubians. Foulahs Basques Semitic Mediterranean Egyptians (?) Jews Arabs Indo-Romanic - . Indians Persians Greeks Romans Slavo-Germanic Slaves Scandinavians Teutons Celts ' Caucasian. �PRESENT LIFE-FORMS Edentata is misleading, as only two members of the order, the Great and the Scaly Ant-eater, are without teeth.) 2. Sirens Dugongs and manatees, or {Sirenia} So called sea-cows; fish-like in from their fancied form, the fore-limbs modi­ resemblance to the fied into paddles, the hind­ fabled mermaids or limbs absent; both these sirens. are plant-feeders. 3. Whale-like . 'Whales ; dolphins ; por( Cetacea} poises ; also adaptation of structure to aquatic life. 4. Hoofed . . Very numerous and valu( Ungulata} able order. Divided into IS&odd-toed—as the horse, the tapir, and his near relation the rhinoceros ; and the even-toed—as swine, and their near re­ lation the hippopotamus ; camel ; deer ; sheep; ox ; all these are plant-feeders. 5. Hyrax or Rock- Represented by a small rabbit . . animal, the coney of the (Hyracoidea} Bible. The shape of the teeth points to affinities with hoofed animals on the one hand and gnawing animals on the other. 6. Trunked. Represented only by the {Proboscidea} elephant, the longestlived and most intelligent of plant-feeders. 7. Flesh-feeders Seals ; bears ; weasels ; ( Carnivora} wolves and other mem­ bers of the dog family ; lions and other members of the cat family. Hare ; rat; beaver ; squir­ 8. Gnawers. rel. A very widespread {Rodentia} class. 9. Insect-feeders Mole ; hedgehog ; shrew. {Insectivora} 10. Finger-winged Bat, highly organised, {Cheiroptera} closely allied to insect­ feeders. 11. Lemurs . {Lemuroidea} 12. Primates. (Pronounced “Prima-tes,” thus pre­ venting confusion with Archbishops). The lemurs are sometimes grouped with monkeys in the order of the “ fourhanded,” a division fall­ ing into disuse ; but they have marked affinities with marsupials, gnawers, and insect-feeders. The “flying lemur,” or colugo, a squirrel-like crea­ ture with webbed hands, appears to be an interest­ ing link between insect­ feeders and Primates. Monkeys ; baboons; man­ like apes (gibbon, orang­ outang, chimpanzee, gorilla), big-jawed, small­ brained, stooping pos­ ture ; Man, big-brained, erect posture—divided into races according to shape of skull, colour of skin, nature of hair. In the foregoing survey of past and present life-history no break in the con­ tinuity of life, or in its fundamental unity, is found. In the unstableness of the first living matter lay the tendency to that variation which, acted upon by manifold agencies in the production of unlikeness, both seen and unseen, has resulted in ever-increasing complexity of forms. But, strive as we may not to overlay with detail, it is not easy to keep clear and constant before the mind the relationship between all life that is and that has been, as well as the identity of that life with, and its dependence upon, the not living. Perhaps this interrelation may be made more apparent in the exposition of the theory of evolution which is now to follow the description of the things evolved. �O - p lu s C hlorophyll 62.— Diagram of Development. PRESENT LIFE-FORMS F ig . P r o to plasm il 77 �PART II—EXPLANATORY. Chapter VI THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH It must be so, for miracles are ceased ; And therefore we must needs admit the means How things are perfected. Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry V., act i. sc. I. The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant and grows; arrives at the quadruped and walks ; arrives at the man and thinks.—Emerson. In the first chapter a summary account was given of the materials which make up the universe. These were comprised under the terms Matter and Motion, as convenient names for an observed order of phenomena of whose ultimate nature we know nothing. As explained already, it is upon the twofold and opposite action of Motion that we base our assumptions as to the nature of matter—i.e., as consisting of atoms of infinite minuteness and complexity. That form of Motion which draws the atoms together into larger or smaller masses, and which resists their separa­ tion, we distinguish as Force; that form of Motion which drives the atoms apart, and resists their combination, we dis­ tinguish as Energy. Both Force and Energy are, like Matter, indestructible ; in other words, the sum-total of each is a fixed quantity. Force inheres in, and cannot be taken from, each atom of weighable matter; but Energy passes from atom to atom, and from mass to mass, its vehicle being that unweighable ethereal medium which, it is assumed, fills the spaces between bodies and between the particles of bodies. In this diverse way each is ceaselessly acting, Force aggregating the particles round various centres, Energy separating them and passing into space, only fractions *of it striking intervening bodies, as, e.g., in the interception of the sun’s radiant energy by the planets. And the certain result, however im­ measurably distant, is that all the Energy of the universe will be dissipated, and that all the matter of the universe will become cold, solid, and inert under the aggregating and unopposed action of Force. The problem we have now to con­ sider is this :—Given Matter and Motion as the raw materials of the universe, is the interaction of Motion, under its two forms of a combining Force and a separating Energy, upon Matter, sufficient to account for the totality of non-living and living contents of the universe ? Of the beginning, of what was before the present state of things, of what will follow the end of it, we know nothing, and speculation about it is futile. Science is concerned with the universe' as we find it, the mobile vehicle of orderly succession; the Evolved, or Unfolded ; das Werden, as the Germans say, or the Becoming: not less wrapped in mystery because we describe it as a mechanical process, and do not fall back upon unknown agencies �THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH or assume unknown attributes of Matter or Motion to explain it. But since everything points to the finite duration of the present universe— for what it now is it once was not, and its state is ever changing—we must make a start somewhere. And we are therefore compelled to posit a primordial nebulous, non-luminous state, when the atoms, with their inherent forces and energies, stood apart from one another. Not evenly distributed, else Force would have drawn them together as a uniform spherical mass round a com­ mon centre of gravity, and Energy, awakened by the collision of atom with atom, would have passed profitlessly in the form of heat to the ethereal medium ; but varying in position and character, with special gravitation towards special centres. This theory of unstableness and unlikeness at the outset squares with the unequal distribution of Matter, with the movements of its masses in different directions and at different rates, and with the ceaseless redistribu­ tion of Matter and Motion. All changes of state are due to the re­ arrangement of atoms through the play of attracting forces and repelling energies, resulting in the evolution of the seeming like into the actual unlike, of the shapeless into the shapely, of the simple into the more and more com­ plex, till the highest complexity . is reached in the development of living matter. If all that is, from fire-fused rock to the genius of man, was wrapped up in primordial matter, with its forces and energies, we can speak of simplicity only in a relative sense as contrasted with the infinite variety around us which has been evolved. (i) Inorganic Evolution.—Under this head we may apply the foregoing princi­ ples to the earliest stages of cosmical change, to the Evolution of Stellar Systems. The existence of nebulous or cloud­ like objects in space, which the tele­ scope, aided by the analysis of the spectroscope, proves to be immense 79 masses of glowing gas, goes far to justify the assumption of a yet more discrete state of the atoms which formed the material universe at the outset. But, although we are familiar with matter in an invisible state, as, e.g., in the element oxygen, which, in a combined state, forms nearly half the solid framework of the globe, we can form no conception of the extreme rarefaction of the primi­ tive atoms. Upon this Helmholtz re­ marks that “if we calculate the density of the mass of our planetary system at the time when it was a nebulous sphere which reached to the path of the outer­ most planet, we should find that it would require several millions of cubic miles of such matter to weigh a single grain.” Given, however, the play of force and energy upon this diffused matter, the mechanics of the process which resulted in the visible universe are not difficult of explanation. The Force bound up in each atom, acting as affinity, com­ bined the atoms as molecules; acting as cohesion, it united the molecules into masses; acting as gravitation, it drew the masses toward their several centres of gravity. One of these masses, by no means the largest, became the nucleus of our solar system, which may be taken as a type of all other masses whose evo­ lution into stellar systems is as yet complete. As the atoms rushed together, Energy, which had hitherto existed in a state, of rest as passive separation, became active in molar and molecular form. As molar energy it imparted motion to each mass —a motion of rotation on its own axis ; and a motion in an orbit, as in the proper motion of double stars, and of the planets round the sun. As molecular energy it imparted a rapid vibratory backwards and forwards motion to the molecules, which motion was forthwith converted into the radiant energy of heat and light, rendering the mass self-luminous. From the moment of their conversion the dissipation of both forms of energy ensued. The friction of the ethereal medium slowly retards the orbital motion �8o THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH of every mass, the molar energy thus lost passing into that medium, until finally the orbital motion will be stopped, ■and the force of gravitation, no longer resisted by energy, will draw the smaller masses to the larger, as vagrant meteors are being ceaselessly drawn to planets and sun. Moons will gravitate to their planets, planets to their suns, and so on, until the matter of the universe, with intermediate outbursts of energy, be­ comes cold, inert, and solid, and Force will have subdued all things unto itself. The molecular energy likewise passes, but more rapidly, into the ethereal medium, throbbing ceaselessly in all directions to the farthest marge of space, if any marge there be. Small portions of it are intercepted by each mass, but of these the larger proportion is reflected back, the remainder setting up separative motions on the surface, as, e.g., in the familiar case of the action of the sun’s radiant heat on the earth. Of this solar energy, which is radiated equally in every direction, the earth does not intercept much more than the two thousand-millionth part. And of this the larger proportion is reflected back ; only a fraction, to be itself finally dissi­ pated, being used to maintain the earth as the theatre of atmospheric and super­ ficial changes whose highest result is life. 2. Evolution of the Solar System.— We may now leave the general for the particular, and apply the theory to the evolution of that particular stellar sys­ tem to which we belong, and to that portion of it which we call the earth. If the explanation of the origin of the sun and planets repeats somewhat of the foregoing, it will only bring home to us the uniformity of the process, and show that what is true of the whole holds good for every part, and for the parts of every part down to the atoms of which all things consist. Two striking pieces of evidence of the common origin of the sun and planets may be cited at the outset: (i) They are made of like materials; (2) they have like motions. (1) The spectroscope has revealed to us the chemical constitution of several of the fixed stars, their enormous dis­ tance not affecting the trustworthiness of the analysis. It evidences the existence of substances in the glowing vapours of their atmospheres akin to those which feed the fires of the sun ; and if such identity of stuff is proved to exist be­ tween the sun and other stars, we may with reason look for still closer identities of material between him and his family of planets, moons, and erratic bodies. In fact, the sun is known to consist of materials largely represented in our earth. (2) The planets and, with rare excep­ tions, their satellites, revolve round him in the same direction ; they also, so far as is known, rotate on their axes in the same direction, and very nearly coincide in the shape and planes of their orbits, which are almost in a plane with the sun’s equator. Now, since the conse­ quences would be the same were these motions, both on axis and in orbit, in the reverse direction, the inference is obvious that there was a uniform motion of rotation of the mass from which they were severally formed. As with the primitive nebula from which that mass was detached, so with the mass itself ; there were differences of density throughout. On no other theory is its segregation into a multitude of bodies explicable. As the rotation of the mass quickened with the indrawing of the particles towards the common centre of gravity, the energy of molar separation acted most powerfully in the region of the bulging equator, and, over­ coming the force of cohesion along the line of least resistance, detached certain portions one after another at irregular intervals from the central mass as it retreated within itself. These portions were the nuclei of the planetary groups, in which the like processes of contraction and rupture were repeated, the masses detached becoming moons, or, as in the case of Saturn, rings of satellites. In respect of the diffused and highly ener­ �THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH 81 equilibrium of temperature is reached, all separative motions cease—no work can be done. The smaller the body, the sooner would its molecular energy be dissipated; in other words, the quicker it lost its heat. The present in a large degree interprets the past, and explains the several stages of the members of our system, according to their bulk. The sun, whose mass exceeds the combined mass of all the planets more than 700 times, is still slowly contracting, and therefore still radiating energy. In this lies the most probable explanation of the 1 The nebular theory of Laplace, some features maintenance of this energy, which at the of which are given in the foregoing text, assumed the casting-off of equatorial rings of matter from present rate of dissipation would cause the central mass, the rings drawing together as the whole diameter to contract 220 feet planetary bodies, from which, in like manner, yearly, or four miles in a century, so that other rings, which became moons, were thrown the sun may become as dense as the off. But the coherence of rings into globes is not proven, and in this, as in some other matters, earth in a few million years.1 The cloud­ Laplace’s theory breaks down. Every astronomer laden atmospheres of the larger planets, as agrees that there was a primitive solar nebula, Jupiter and Saturn, are torn by cyclones and that the planets were once an integral part only second to those of the sun in their of it, but “how it became ordered and organised, how it collected into spheres, leaving wide inter­ fury, and the molten centres feed volcanic spaces clear, the wisest are perplexed to outbursts to which those of Vesuvius and decide.” Krakatoa are mere squibs. But as for For a lucid criticism of the defects of La­ the smaller bodies, their turmoil is calmed place’s theory, more especially in its failure to account for the peculiar distribution of the and their light extinguished; the store of larger and smaller planets, the reader may study energy is exhausted; the forces of affinity with advantage Mr. Proctor’s essay on “How and cohesion have gained the upper hand the Planets Grew,” in his Expanse of Heaven. and drawn the particles together into the A foot-note on Sir Norman Lockyer’s theory of the meteoric origin of the heavenly bodies solid form. Thus it is with the moon, was appended to previous editions of this book. on whose dead and barren surface we The paper in which that theory was expounded may read the future of the giant planets was enlarged into a volume entitled The Meteorand the sun himself. For the history of itic Hypothesis, and the theory has been re-stated in Sir Norman Lockyer’s The S-un's Place in one is the history of all; each has passed, Nature. That re-statement, together with the or is passing, from the indefinite nebulous mis-statement in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s gised fugitive masses, as comets and meteors, Mr. Proctor has adduced cogent reasons in support of the theory that they are “products of expulsion from suns, from giant planets, and from orbs like our earth when in the sun-like state.”1 The origin of the planets and their moons being found in the mode described above, it is obvious that in their primitive state they were molten, and shone by their own light. All hot bodies part with their heat to cooler bodies; and when » fantastic Maris Place in the Universe that Sir Norman Lockyer’s theory is “gradually spread­ ing among astronomers and mathematicians,” make it desirable to say that the objections summarised in the foot-note have lost none of their weight, but have, in fact, gathered force from the inability of Sir Norman Lockyer to prove his assumption of identity between the spectrum of meteoric dust and that of nebulae. His contention that the chief nebular line is due to magnesium is met by proof that it differs, both in position and character, from the spectrum of that element. In fact, such eminent authorities as Professors Schemer and Newcomb are of opinion that the theory is not worth the time needed to refute it, and this opinion is fully endorsed by our highest authority on spectrum analysis, Sir Williarp Huggins, P. R.S. 1 Recent researches show that contraction of the sun’s mass is not the sole, nor, perhaps, even a chief, cause of the maintenance of his heat. Possibly radium may be present in sufficient quantity to play a large part in this, and, as Mr. Maunder suggests in Knowledge (November 1903), the same or similar radio-active properties may be possessed by other solar constituents, or by the sun himself as a whole. By radio-activity is understood the spontaneous emission of radia­ tion which a few elements, as uranium, thorium, and radium, give off incessantly without any apparently exciting cause. But the more we advance in knowledge, the more do the mysteries of cosmic dynamics multiply, and in the penetra­ tion of these the achievements of the twentieth century may surpass those of the nineteenth century. �82 THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH state, through numberless modifications, to the definite and solid state, by decrease in volume and increase in density. What the earth is, the moon was; what the moon is, the earth will be. 3. Evolution of the Earth.—To this passage from the sun-like to the solid state the earth bears witness. Its flattened poles, its bulging equator, its spheroidal shape, are the effects of rota­ tion on a fluid or viscous mass ; whilst the geologically oldest parts of the crust —for there is no primogeniture in matter are of a structure which is producible only by the fusion of particles under intense heat. As that crust, thin and mobile, at the outset, continued to cool and thicken, it evidenced more strikingly the play of forces and energies within, and of energies and, in lesser degree, of forces without. The cooling and shrinking of the internal mass, as the stored-up energy slipped away, caused tension of the crust, which, yielding to the force of gravitation, was drawn in­ wards, and cracked and crumpled into mountains and valleys, and into the deep depressions which the great oceans have filled since the time when their waters were first condensed from the thick primitive vapours that swathed the cooling earth. Then the continuous action of the sun’s radiant energy, oper­ ating through air and water upon the increasingly rigid crust, dissolved its superficial particles, and re-deposited them as stratified rocks, in endless beauty and variety, over the surface of the globe. And herein lies the major cause of our earth’s present condition as a possible abode of life. For its native supply of energy—that of position derived from the momentum given it when thrown off from the parent mass ; and the still, unspent, but always lessen­ ing, store of internal heat1manifest in the volcano and the earthquake—would not suffice to arrest effeteness and the wrap­ ping of the globe in a winding-sheet of ice. It. is the imported supply from the sun which alone does that, for in its absence the trivial tidal energy due to the moon would be futile, because the seas and oceans would be solid. Oppos­ ing the force which attracts everything into inert union, the solar energy sets up the separative motions, the ceaseless re­ distributions, which give rise to the grand climatal and vital phenomena of nature. Expanding the air, it causes the inrush to which winds and storms are due ; heating the water, it excites the warm currents, and draws heavenward the aqueous vapour, which, driven by the wind, returns, when its energy is lost, as rain and snow, those silent yet mightiest agents of mechanical, chemical, and vital changes. But the full signifi­ cance of the work done by the sun­ beams that strike the earth’s surface will appear, when we treat of the relation of the living to the non-living. 1 We possess no criterion in our surface observations as to whether or not the interior of the earth is rising in temperature. Arguing from the presence of radium, whereby the loss of heat by radiation into space is probably made good, Professor Joly thinks that it is rising, but he adds as to the destiny of our globe, “ peaceful cooling may await it or catastrophic heating may lead-in a new era of life.” �Chapter VII THE ORIGIN OF LIFE The fascination which the question of the origin of life possesses is not lessened by the slow abrasion of the artificial lines which divide the living from the non-living. Round it, like planet tethered to sun by the invisible force of attraction, the mind of man revolves, unable to disentangle itself and escape into a larger orbit, whence the truer proportions of things may be seen; nor will the undue importance accorded to the living vanish until there is deepened within us that sense of the unbroken interrelation of all things to which science brings her “ cloud of witnesses.” It is agreed that there was an “ azoic” or lifeless period in the history of the earth—therefore that life had a begin­ ning ; and it is with the evidence as to continuity or gap between the azoic and the zoic epochs that the present chapter is concerned. The azoic stage is evidenced by the primordial temperature of the globe, which, taking the present temperature of the sun as a fair standard of comparison, is computed to have been 14,000 times hotter than boiling water. Under such highly energetic conditions chemical combinations of the vaporous particles were impossible, and, a fortiori., vital combinations. But with the slow cooling consequent upon the continuous passage of the earth’s molecular energy into space, the combining forces came into more and more active play, forming first the extremely simple and more stable compounds, as water; then the more complex and less stable, as salts; and so on in increasing complexity of material and unlikeness of structure. Obviously an enormous fall in the temperature took place before the superheated mass became cool enough to permit the form­ ation of an outer crust. It was into the depressions of this crust that the vapours which floated over it fell as they con­ densed, forming water, which at first was probably at the temperature of a dull red heat. Thus far, in broad outline, the material foundation for the superstructure of life. When, where, and how did life begin ? As to the time, we have no evidence whatever. Life is enormously older than any record of it. Even the higher forms were developed long before the periods in which we first find their remains. As to the place, probably in polar regions, as Buffon suggested in his “ Epoques de la Nature.” As the globe cooled, those regions would be the earliest to reach a tem­ perature under which life is possible. The Comte de Saporta, whose researches give large support to Buffon’s theory, remarks that the richest fossil-yielding rocks are found in northern latitudes of 50° to 60° and beyond. They show that as far back as Silurian times the North Pole was warm enough to maintain life of a tropical character, and that it was the centre of origin of successive forms down to the Tertiary epoch; the Miocene flora, which has now to be sought 40° farther south, being profusely repre­ sented. In Carboniferous times a warm, moist, equable climate prevailed over the whole globe, due, as De Saporta �84 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE explains, to arrest of radiation by a highly vaporous atmosphere, and also, perhaps, to the greater diffuseness of the sun’s light by reason of his larger volume. Sir W. Thiselton-Dyer says that all the great assemblages of plants seem to admit of being traced back at some time in their history to the northern hemisphere with its preponderating land-surface. It is therefore to the North Pole, more than to the South Pole, whose secrets, however, no man has yet wrested,1 that all evidence points as the area of the origin and distribution of life. The great land-masses radiate southwards, forming, with their alternations of sub­ mergence beneath shallow seas, and of upheaval, channels of migration for life­ forms, the modifications in which have arisen from causes to be dealt with presently. In contrast to this, the South Pole, through its isolation by the deep oceans, whose beds have never been dry land since the waters filled their cavities, has maintained only a slender connection with the continents and large islands tapering towards it, and its plants and animals have been unable to make headway against the ceaseless life-stream from the north. So that given time, evolution, continental continuity, changes of climate and elevation of the land, and it would appear that the dominant types may. be traced back to the northern hemisphere.1 2 As to the mode, let us approach the problem by treating of what is common to both the lifeless and the living. Now, in brief, there are no elements in the one which do not occur in the other. The most complex plant and animal, and the lowest living germ, so apparently devoid of structure that it can only by courtesy be called an organism, are alike made of materials derived, directly or indirectly, from earth and air and water. These materials are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, with a little sulphur and phosphorus, and still fainter' traces of other elements, combined in extreme and elusive complexity. Of the several elements entering into this subtile com­ bination, carbon is probably the element to which the most prominent part is to be assigned. Its affinity for itself, and its faculty of uniting in manifold re­ lations both of number and weight, cause its compounds to be more numerous and important than those of all the other elements taken together. Combining with the foregoing elements, it gives rise to protoplasm, from which by successive modifications, slow in their operations, the teeming variety of living things has been developed. These, as explained already, are made up of myriads of cells, each of which is a life­ centre, their combination being the sum­ total of the life of the organism. As the cell itself is an organisation formed from protoplasm, and marks the first stage in 1 Coal seams and traces of fossil flora of constant stimulation by bright sunlight: and (pine trees ?) have been discovered by Sir E. if, further, it is admitted that it is to internal Shackleton, who reached within 93 miles of the South Pole in 1909. heat we may ascribe the tropical aspect of the former vegetation of the polar region, then there 2 Cf. the Comte Gaston de Saporta’s L'Ancienne Vegetation Polaire, in Compte Rendu of is no necessity for assuming that the solar system at those periods was in a warmer area of stellar the International Congress of Geography held space, or that the position of the poles was in Paris, 1875 (published 1877); extracts from altered, to account for the high temperature of Sir J. D. Hooker’s Address to the Royal Society, 1877, in Proceedings of Royal Geog. pre-Glacial times in high northern latitudes ; or, Soc., vol. i., 1879, from which the following lastly, that the main features of the great con­ is quoted : “ Perhaps the most novel idea tinents and oceans were very different in early in Count Saporta’s essay is that of the diffused geological times from what they now are.” Also sunlight which (with a densely clouded atmo­ Wallace’s Island Life, ch. xxiii. passim ; Thiselsphere) the author assumes to have been ! ton-Dyer’s lecture on “Plant Distribution as a operative in reducing the contrast between Field of Geographical Research,” Proc. Royal Geog. Soc., xxii. 415, 1878; Grant Alien’s the polar summers and winters. If it be Vignettes from Nature,“ The Fall of the Year ” ; accepted, it at once disposes of the difficulty of admitting that evergreen trees survived a and Sir J. W. Dawson’s Geol. Hist, of Plants, long polar winter of total darkness, and summer pp. 221, 257. �THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 85 visible structure, the question as to the wise impracticable.”1 But, although the mode of origin of life narrows itself to living thing affects us much more nearly the origin, not of complex organisms, than lifeless stones and rain, it hides no nor of cells, but of protoplasm. Given profounder mystery than they. The the matter which composes it, and the “ affinities,” as in our ignorance we name play of forces and energies of which that them, which lock the elements into matter is the vehicle, wherein lies the beautiful crystalline forms, are no whit difference which gives as one result non­ less wonderful than the motions in living substance, and as another result matter through which the same elements living substance? The answer ob­ manifest the phenomena of life. The viously is that, the ingredients being origin of life is not a more stupendous the samç, the difference must lie in the problem to solve than the origin of water. Both protoplasm and water have mixing. We are already familiar in the in­ properties that do not belong to the organic world with the existence of the individual atoms which compose them, same element in more than one form, and the greater complexity of the living but with different characteristics—of structure does not constitute a difference carbon, as diamond, graphite, and char­ in kind, but only in degree. It does coal ; the difference being doubtless due not seem, after all, such a far cry from to molecular arrangement. Chemistry the crystal to the amoeba as from the also reveals intimate likeness of materials amoeba to Plato and Newton. The in the compounds known as isomeric, crystal and the amceba take their place in which the physical and chemical as independent products of physical and properties vary considerably. It has chemical change, and cannot do other also manufactured organic compounds, than obey the law of their development. as starch, urea, and alcohol, the pro­ The crystals of rock-salt, determined by duction of which was once thought im­ the mutual action of the attractive and possible ; and if the experiments _ to repellent poles of their atoms, dispose produce the living out of the non-living themselves as cubes; the crystals of by decoctions of hay and extracts of snow as hexagons ; of sulphur as rhom­ beef have failed, as we might expect boids ; and the protoplasmic atoms, they would, this failure can have no obeying their polarities and charged weight against the argument that we with separating energies, dispose them­ cannot think any limit to the possi­ selves “each after his kind.” _ But bilities of nature’s subtile transmuta­ whilst the crystal grows by accretion at tions during the vast periods that the the surface, although even this distinc­ earth has been a possible abode of tion has its rare exceptions, the cell life. And is not the transmutation grows by assimilation or intussusception, of the inorganic into the organic cease­ i.e., by inflowing of nutrition amongst all lessly going on within the laboratory its parts,2 the new replacing the old, of the plant under the agency of chloro­ yet maintaining its structure and com­ position, like the fabled ship of Theseus, phyll ? The ultimate cause which, bringing 1 Cf. Cope’s Origin of the Fittest, p. 436. certain lifeless bodies together, gives Modern theories of matter lend significance to living matter as the result, is a profound Professor Cope’s suggestion, and it is to be re­ mystery. “ The transition between the gretted that he is no longer with us to know organic and the inorganic energies may this. ... . , 2 The so-called precipitation cells or mineral be possibly found in the electric group. organisms known, after their discoverer, as Its influence on life, its production of Traube’s cells, are spoken of with contempt by contractions in protoplasm, and its re­ Sachs, who says that their resemblance to living semblance to nerve-force, are well known. cells has been much exaggerated. (Cf. Leet, on It also compels chemical unions other­ Physiol, of Plants, p. 215.) �86 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE which remained the same although re­ paired so often that not an original plank was left. Speaking relatively—for nothing is absolutely motionless—the crystal is stable, irresponsive: the cell is plastic, unstable, responsive, adapting itself to the slightest variation; it “stoops to conquer,” and so undergoes ceaseless modification by interaction with its ever­ changing environment. Life involves delicacy of construction; hence the transient nature of the organic in con­ trast to the abiding nature of the in­ organic. And, strange as it may seem, separation is life ; integration is death. For life is due to the sun’s radiant energy, which, setting up separative move­ ments, enables the plant to convert, through its mysterious alchemy, the life­ less into the living, thus forming energetic compounds, which are used partly by the thrifty plant for its own vital needs, and largely by the spendthrift animal for its nutrition, to repair waste and maintain functions. Ultimately the energy thus derived from the sun, directly by the plant and indirectly by the animal, passes into space, and “ the dust returns to the earth as it was.” For life is only a local and temporary arrest of the universal movement towards equilibrium. Turning to mental phenomena, from its lowest manifestations in the simplest reflex action of the amoeba or the sun­ dew when touched, to its highest mani­ festations in consciousness or self-know­ ledge, we find the connection between it and the bodily movements a greater crux than the connection between the inor­ ganic and the organic. We know that all the thoughts we think, and all the emotions we feel, involve a physical pro­ cess ; that is to say, they are accompanied by certain chemical changes or molecular vibrations in nerve-tissue, involving waste or large expenditure of energy, which is repaired by food. We know that the healthy working of the brain depends upon nourishment, upon abstinence from excess, upon freedom from injury. Starve, or stun, or stupefy a man, let palsy or paralysis afflict him, and the complex machinery is thrown out of gear. And we know that the larger the proportion of brain to body, and especially the more numerous and intricate the furrows and creases in the grey matter of the brain, the higher in the life-scale are the mental powers. But the gulf between consciousness and the movements of the molecules of nerve-matter, measurable as these are, is impassable; we can follow the steps of the mechanical processes of nerve­ changes . till we reach the threshold which limits the known, and beyond that barrier we cannot go. We can neither affirm nor deny; we can only confess ignorance. “ If any one says that consciousness cannot exist except in the relation of cause and effect with certain organic molecules, I must ask how he knows that; and if he says that it can, I must put the same question.”1 That is the impregnable position of physical science as defined by the greatest expositor of our time. “Soul is only known to us in a brain, but the special note of soul is that it is capable of existing without a brain or after death.”2 That is the unverifiable assumption of dogmatic theology. 1 Professor Huxley on “ Science and Morals,” Fortnightly Review, December, 1886. 2 Principal Tulloch, Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion, p. 328. �Chapter VIII THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS Moisture as well as heat is essential to life ; therefore life had its beginnings in water,1 the earliest organisms being probably plants. As to this the fossil­ yielding rocks tell us nothing, and the lowest and simplest organisms have so much in common that any attempt to gather evidence from them on the matter must fail. But, however closely the earliest life-forms were related, there is, as noted already, fundamental difference to be drawn between their successors in the mode of nutrition, a difference which may throw some light upon the problem of priority, and which is not effaced by the existence of certain flesh-eating plantsand vegetating animals, since this witnesses to the interchange of modifications of which protoplasm is capable. It has been shown that the plant alone has the power to convert the elements of lifeless matter into the living solid state, thereby storing up energy for its own use in growth and germination, and for the use directly or indirectly of the animal. This the plant is enabled to do solely in virtue of its chlorophyll, which absorbs certain sun-rays, and sets up 1 “It was in the littoral region that all the primary branches of the zoological family tree were formed ; all terrestrial and deep-sea forms have passed through a littoral phase, and amongst the representatives of the littoral fauna the re­ capitulative history in the form of series oflarval conditions is most completely retained.”—Pro­ fessor Moseley, Nature, September 3, 1885. And the primary condition of animal develop­ ment was the development of plant-life in the same region. chemical action by which carbon is separated from oxygen in carbonic acid gas, and hydrogen from oxygen in water, forming hydrocarbons in which energy is stored up. Now, if the animal is entirely dependent upon the plant for this energy, it would seem that plants were developed first. For, remarks Professor Sachs, “as all animals are devoid of chlorophyll-con­ taining organs, and are thus unable to form organic substance from carbon dioxide and water, although they build up their bodies from such substance, it follows obviously that the substance of the bodies of all animals is originally produced in the chlorophyll cells of plants. The few lower animals which apparently contain chlorophyll—certain Infusoria, Sponges, and Planarioe1— con­ tain chlorophyll as a matter of fact, not as a proper constituent of the body, but, as Brandt has recently shown, have vege­ table cells (Algse) containing chlorophyll in their bodies ; by means of the assimi­ lation of these green bodies such animals 1 The following list of chlorophyllian animals has been drawn up by Professor Ray Lankester :— Foraminifera. Ccelentera. Radiolaria. Hydra viridis. Rhaphiophrys viridis. Anthea smaragdina. Heterophrysmyriapoda. Vermes. Infusoria. Mesostomum viride. Stenior Mulleri, &c. Boneilia viridis. „ .. Chsetopterus ValenciSP°nSldaennesii. Spongillafluviatilis. Crustacea (Isopoda). Idoteea viridis. �THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS may be nourished under certain circum­ stances.” 1 Grant Allen has marshalled the facts in support of the priority of plants in a paper of great force and clearness, which has apparently received but scant atten­ tion from biologists.2 He submits that Fig. 63.—Chlorophyll Granules in Leaf-cells (magnified 550 diameters). A. Granules of chlorophyll, with starch grains imbedded in the protoplasm of the cells. B. Separated granules, a, b, young granules ; b', U', granules dividing; c, d, e, old granules ; f, granule swollen by water ; g, starch granules in which water has destroyed the chlorophyll. (After Sachs.) as the solar rays are, in the absence of chlorophyll, powerless to set up the separative action resulting in the material on which alone life can be sustained, the inference is obvious—no .chlorophyll, no 1 Sachs, pp. 298-99. 2 Gentleman's Magazine, June 1885, art. “ Genesis.” life. In other words, life being due to energy radiated from the sun, which energy is inoperative without chloro­ phyll, protoplasm plus chlorophyll is the physical basis of .life. Against this we have the opinion of authorities of the rank of Professor Ray Lankester among zoologists, and of Thiselton-Dyer among botanists, that the earliest protoplasm was destitute of chlorophyll. They contend that since chlorophyll is a modification of certain parts of the protoplasmic cells, it is not a thing of primary origin, but a later acquirement, slowly attained. Both authorities incline to regard certain forms of fungi as representing “ more closely than any other living forms the original ancestors of the whole organic world 1 . . . which existed before plants possessed chlorophyll at all,” But fungi “ draw their nutriment from compounds derived from other organisms, and there­ fore in a higher state of aggregation than those the green plants make use of, so far approaching animals in the mode of their nutrition.” 2 That is to 1 Ency. Brit., arts. “Protozoa,” p. 832, and “ Biology,” p. 691. 2 “ Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, Ifind no record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the con­ ditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not ; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man may recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter. I should expect to seé it appear under forms of great simplicity, en­ dowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phos­ phates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me ; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion �THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 89 say, fungoids are like animals; they use fied. The organism is the sum of life up the energy which the plants accumu­ of all the cell-units. late, and fill a secondary place in the The one-celled forms increase by succession of life-forms. The strength division. Growth is the balance of re­ of the argument in support of plant­ pair over waste; and when through priority lies in this, that viewing life as a assimilation of food into its substance product of motion operating under its the cell reaches a certain size, the force separating action of Energy upon Matter, of cohesion is overcome by the release an energy-storing organism must have come first. If the first proto­ plasm lacked chlorophyll, it had within it the possibilities which permitted its secretion at an early stage; it was, to use an unavoid­ ably long word, chlorophyllaceous. The question, however, is of no serious importance in view of the common evolution of living things, and we may pass to less debatable ground in inquiry into the causes which have developed them in countless variety from specks of relatively formless protoplasm. The cell is the structural start­ ing-point of all life. The nucleus which it encloses is the result of the first visible approach of proto­ plasm to unlikeness of parts, and is the chief centre of activity. Every cell arises by separation from a pre-existing cell, and every living organism is made up of one cell or of many cells. The single cell of which the lowest organisms are composed does everything ap­ pertaining to life : it feels, moves, feeds, and multiplies. In the complex or many-celled organisms Fig. 64.—Cells of Root of Fritillary (magnified 550 these functions are divided among diameters). the cells, each of which is in­ from dependent, but nevertheless adapts A. Very young cellabove near apex. B. From two mm. it. itself for the work it has to do, C. From about 8 mm. h, cell-wall; /, protoplasm ; k, nucleus ; kk nucleoli; 5, vacuoles and cell-sap cavity. (After Sachs.) acting in common with its fellow­ cells. Division of labour causes differ­ of the energy derived from food, and the ence of structure—stem, root, sap, leaf, cell divides equally at the kernel or and seed in the plant; bone, muscle, nucleus. The slimy protoplasm distri­ nerve-tissue, blood, and egg in the butes itself around each nucleus as the animal: all are communities of cells of two part company, to grow and divide astounding minuteness variously modi- again in like manner ad infinitum. To these lowest Protozoa we may apply the any thing but an act of philosophical faith.”— words, “ thou art the same, and thy years Huxley’s Critiques and Addresses, p. 238. (The italics are mine.) shall have no end,” at least till all life �9c THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS here has end ; for they were the Alpha, and may be the Omega, in the earth’s life-history; neither is one before nor after the other, since there is no descent amongst them, but only lateral multipli­ cation. In many Protozoa a small portion of the parent is detached—a •m Fig. 65.—Cell. process known as generation by budding; but this and other modes of whole or partial fission are classed together as reproduction by multiplication. The next stage in structure is when the cells in dividing remain, to their common advantage, grouped together, as in all animals above the Protozoa. The cells divide 1 in definite order into two, then into four, eight, sixteen, and so on, clustering together in a morula, or mulberry-like mass, in which a cavity filled with fluid is formed, the cells being parted and driven to the surface. Mutual pressure, as they continue to subdivide, causes them to flatten and range themselves side by side in a single layer, forming what is called a blastosphere (Gr. blastos, a bud). By a process which is somewhat obscure (for we are dealing with the movements of very 1 Cell-division does not extend to the food­ yolk which the eggs of birds, reptiles, and many other animals contain for the nutriment of the embryo. minute bodies), but which corresponds to the conversion of a small india-rubber ball, having a pinhole in it, into a two­ walled cup by pushing it in with the finger, the single-layered sphere becomes changed into a double layered hood- or horseshoe-like structure, called a gas­ trula (Gr. dim. of gaster, stomach).1 The simpler stationary animals, as sponges and polyps, do not advance beyond this stage, but in all animals above them, in which bilateral structure, probably through free movement in a given direction, is developed, a third layer larger and more complex arises. The other two layers apparently take an equal share in its formation, and from its subdivision the greater number of organs of the body, be it of a worm or a man, are developed. Passing over much technical detail, it must suffice to say that the upper layer gives rise to the skin, the nervous system, and organs of sense ; the lower layer to the intestinal canal and appendages ; and the middle layer to the general skeleton, the heart, and other important organs. Thus does the future animal emerge from the gastrula stage, and pass into the embryo stage, until an ad­ vanced period of which the embryos of verte­ brates, whether fish, tortoise, dog, ape, or man, cannot be dis­ tinguished from one another, so close are the likenesses both in outward form and structure. All plants and animals above the lowest are reproduced by the agency of special cells, the impregnation of the nucleus of the germ or egg-cell of the female by the nucleus of the sperm-cell of the male being necessary to set up the series of changes which result in the future animal.2 There are numerous 1 On the variations in the gastrula type, see Haeckel’s Evolution of Man, i, 231, and plates 2 and 3, pp. 240-2. 2 At the present time the cell theory, in con­ sequence of recent investigations into the struc- �THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS variations in the organs of reproduction, but whatever unlikenesses exist in detail do not affect this general statement; alga and oak, sponge and man, are alike developed from germs variously called spores, sacs, seeds, and eggs. The 91 cell, epitomises the history of the ancestral forms of its species. The transmission of parental form and structure, as well as of mental character, to offspring, being clear, the question suggests itself, How have variations, resulting in millions of past and present species of plants and animals, arisen ? Professor Huxley says that “ the great need of the doctrine of evolution is a theory of variation.”1 When, however, we consider the mobility and minute complexity of structure of living things invisible to the naked eye, and their response to every shiver of energy from without, we have sufficing factors to structure of the fertilised egg of the parent determines the structure of the offspring, which to some extent repro­ duces the series of forms through which its ancestors passed as it progresses to a, b, brain vesicles ; c, blastoderm ; d, primitive vertebras ; e, medullary cord ; f, upper layer or body-wall. Fig. 68.—Gastrula Stage. A, upper cell layer; B, lower cell layer ; C, primitive mouth ; D, body-cavity. its adult state. In other words, the individual, as it develops from the eggture and metamorphosis of the nucleus, is undergoing a new development of great signifi­ cance, which, among other things, foreshadows the possibility of the establishment of a physical theory of heredity on a safer foundation than those which Buffon and Darwin devised. (Hux­ ley, art. “ Science,” Reign of Queen Victoria, ii, 376.) “The pith of the matter is that structural elements of the male nucleus appear to be associated with those of the female in the fecundated ovum and all its derived cells.” (Extract from a letter from Professor Huxley to the Author.) And cf. Wiedersheim’s Comf. Anat. of Vertebrates, pp. 4, 300. produce unstableness which will result in unlikeness of parts. Given a body which, although a minute speck, contains billions of molecules performing compli­ cated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitive in an inconceivable degree to the play of vibrations impinging upon them at the rate of hundreds of trillions per second, would not the marvel be if these quivering particles of the structure, shaken by energies within, and by still more potent energies without, did not undergo continuous redistribution ? 2 1 Critiques and Addresses, p. 299; and cf. Science and Culture, p. 307. 2 “ What organism can pass through life without being subjected to more or less new conditions ? What life is ever the exact fac­ simile of another? And in a matter of such �THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS The position may be thus stated:— The organism has—(i) Infinite complex­ ity of structure ; (2) inherited tendencies; (3) mobility and continuous motion, therefore capacity to vary. (4) Varia­ tions are induced by the surroundings on which, as vehicles of energy, life depends; (5) when the surroundings change, the organism adapts itself or not to the change ; (6) such as fail to adapt themselves perish; (7) such as adapt themselves vary in greater or lesser degree; (8) these variations, being transmitted, are stages in the develop­ ment of different life-forms. To put the and adapting hints from Malthus 1 and other writers in the clearing up of ques­ tions suggested by observations extend­ ing over many years, Darwin propounded a theory which in the judgment of every biologist unfettered by predilections or prejudices, accounts in large degree for the origin of species.2 1 See Darwin’s Letter to Haeckel, Hist, of Crea­ tion,!. 134 ; also Darwin’s Life and Letters, i. 83. 2 “ I am satisfied that natural selection is a true cause ; and whatever may be the final result of our present inquiries—whether animated nature be derived from one ancestral source or from many—the publication of the Origin of Species will none the less have constituted an Fig. 70.—Corresponding stages in the development of Fish Dog Man a., brain ; b, eye ; c, ear ; d, gills ; e, tail. matter briefly, likenesses are inherited, variations are acquired. This brings us to the theory linked with Darwin’s name, which explains by what operation of natural causes the highest plants and animals have descended by true generation and slow modification from less complex life-forms, and these in ever-lessening degrees of complexity and unlikeness, until the common starting-point from the lowest or one-celled organism is reached. Following Lyell’s method of explaining the past by agencies still in operation, extreme delicacy as the adjustment of psychical and physical relations, who can say how small a disturbance of established equilibrium may not involve how great a rearrangement?”—Luck or Cunning? p. 273, by Samuel Butler. (See Headley’s Problems of Evolution, pp. 33, 38. ) epoch in the history of biology.”—Lubbock’s Origin, &c., of Insects, p. 83 ; and cf. Spencer’s Factors of Organic Evolution, passim, for dis­ cussion of the limitations of Darwin’s theory. As opposed to the so-called Neo-Darwinians, who plead, with Weismann, for the “ all-sufficiency of natural selection,” Mr. Spencer defends, with modifications, the theory of Lamarck that the influence of external conditions and the exercise of their organs by animals have been factors in the origin of species. In certain ill-informed and prejudiced quarters, the statement has been circulated that the experi­ ments on plants made by the Abbé Mendel above forty years ago, and revived by Professor de Vries, the result of which is to show that evolution may proceed by large or sudden steps (“mutations” they are called) and not solely by small steps, as Darwin held, shake the theory of natural selec­ tion, whereas that theory is in no wise affected by such experiments. As an explanation “ of the origin of species by the survival of selected races in the. struggle for existence it is more firmly established than ever.” (Cf. Sir Ray Lankester’s Kingdom of Man, p. 125.) �Chapter IX THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES The history of the slow but sure pre­ paration of the scientific world for the reception of a theory displacing the old notions of the fixity of species ; and the record of the kings and prophets who foreknew the coming day, but who died “ without the sight," are set forth by Grant Allen in his monograph on Charles Darwin. Commending the reading of that book, especially of the fifth chapter, as superseding the need for repeating the story here, we may pass to a rapid sum­ mary of the evidence as to the mutability of species. It should be noted at the outset that “ species ” is a convenient term to denote groups of individuals having certain characters in common, but that no one definition of “ species ” has satisfied all naturalists. The term “variety” is almost equally difficult to define; but practically, when a naturalist can unite by means of close intermediate links any two forms, he treats the one as a “variety ” of the other, ranking the most common, but sometimes the one first described, as the “ species,” and the other as the “ variety.”1 i. No two individuals of the same species are exactly alike; each tends to vary. Of this obvious fact every species, with its several varieties, from man downwards, supplies abundant illustration. Of the hundreds of thou­ sands of faces that we meet in the course of the year in any large city, each has 1 Cf. Origin of Species, p. 33> 6th ed. some feature to mark it from every other ; the practised eye of the shepherd recognises each sheep in his flock, of the Laplander each reindeer among the herd crowded “ like ants on an anthill,” and of the gardener each hyacinth among a thousand bulbs. Children of the same parents vary in size, feature, complex­ ion, character, and constitution, often very obviously, but sometimes too obscurely, for cursory detection ; and this law of general resemblance, with more or less variation in detail, applies to all animals and plants.1 The tendency to vary, which in our ignorance of its ulti­ mate causes we say “ inheres ” in the organism, and of which what are called “ sports ” furnish the best illustration,2 is fostered by the change of condition in which the animal or plant may be placed, as shown in its more marked tendency to vary in a domesticated than in a wild state. For example, when the common ringed snake, which in its natural state is oviparous, is confined in a cage in which no sand is strewn, it becomes viviparous. Throughout these pages stress has been laid on the fact that the organ adapts itself to the work which it has to do; hence changes of structure in a species are necessitated to fit it for an altered state of things. This implies increased or lessened activity on the part of certain organs, the use or disuse lead1 Cf. Animals and Plants under Domestica­ tion, i, 445 ; ii, 238, 2nd ed. 2 Origin of Species, p. 8 ; A. and P., i, 397. �94 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ing, under the action of natural selection working through long ages, to their development or suppression. 2. Variations are transmitted, and therefore tend to become permanent. In other words, what is peculiar to the parent plant or animal reappears in the offspring. This is known as “descent with modification,” the import of which will be shown later on. 3. Man takes advantage of these trans­ mitted unlikenesses to produce new varieties of plants and animals. He selects cer­ tain individuals possessing variations which he wants to preserve, and allows only them to breed together, by which means in the course of time he produces varieties differing greatly from the parent form with which he started. The stock example of this is the pigeon. All our domestic pigeons, exceeding in number a hundred well-marked races, are descended from the ordinary blue rock pigeon of the European coasts. Varia­ tions as marked as the fan-tail, the tumbler, and the pouter, have been pro duced by the breeder selecting birds with certain peculiarities, and choosing from each successive brood only those which exhibited the same peculiarities in more marked form, the result being, after a long time, the production of entirely new varieties. The same method has given us different races of dogs, sheep, horses, and other domestic animals. The fleetest horses are chosen to breed together; then the fleetest off­ spring of these in succession, until horses are produced whose swiftness far exceeds that of the originally selected pairs. In the development of the cart­ horse, strength, not speed, is the quality selected ; while in the marked unlikeness between dogs we see the result of artificial selection in producing such varieties as the bloodhound, the terrier, and the spaniel. What varieties in flowers, vegetables, and fruits—as, for example, the development of the numer­ ous kinds of apples from the small, sour crab species—the like method has in­ duced, is too well known to need detailed reference here. When we see how successfully this choice of slight variations has brought about plants and animals best adapted to the service of man, we may desire the time when man shall so realise his duty to the race that the multiplication of the rickety, both physically and morally, will cease, and men and women only of the highest type reproduce their kind. Now the important work which Darwin did was to show that what man does on a small scale within a limited range of time, nature does on a large scale during countless epochs; with the further differ­ ence that the action of nature is not pur­ posive, as is the action of man, but in­ volved in the necessities of things. We may quote what Darwin says on this matter :— “As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, wh§t may not natural selection effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters : Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural pre­ servation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good : Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her, as is implied by the fact of their selection. Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short-beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his pro- �THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ductions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form, or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch the eye or to be plainly useful to him. Under Nature the slightest differences of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be pre­ served. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man ! how short his time ! and, consequently, how poor will be his results, compared with those accumu­ lated by Nature during whole geo­ logical periods ! Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘ truer ’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be in­ finitely better adapted to the most com­ plex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workman­ ship ? ”1 4. More organisms are born than sur­ vive. To quote Darwin once more, “ there is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slowbreeding man has doubled in twentyfive years, and at this rate in less than a thousand years there would literally not be standing-room for his progeny.”2 If all the offspring of the elephant, the slowest breeder known, survived, there would be in seven hundred and fifty years nearly nineteen million elephants alive, descended from the first pair. If the eight or nine million eggs which the roe of a cod is said to contain developed into adult cod-fishes, the sea would quickly become a solid mass of them. So prolific is its progeny after progeny, that the common house-fly is computed to produce twenty-one millions in a sea­ son ; while so enormous is the laying power of the aphis, or plant-louse, that the tenth brood of one parent, without adding the products of all the gener­ ations which precede the tenth, would contain more ponderable matter than all 1 Cf. Origin of Species, p. 65. 2 Ibid, p. 51- 95 the population of China, estimating this at five hundred millions ! It is the same with plants. If an annual plant produced only two seeds yearly, and all the seedlings survived and reproduced in like number, one million plants would be produced in twenty years from the single ancestor. Should the increase be at the rate of fifty seeds yearly, the result, if unchecked, would be to cover the whole globe in nine years, leaving no room for other plants. The lower organisms multiply with astonish­ ing rapidity, some minute fungi increasing a billionfold in a few hours, while the protococcus, or red snow, multiplies so fast as to tinge many acres of snow with its crimson in a night. But we need notgive further examples of this fecundity whereby nature, “ so careless of the single life,” secures the race against extinction. 5. The result is obvious: a ceaseless struggle for food and place. In that struggle the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong; the weaker, be it in brain or body, going to the wall, the vast majority never reaching maturity, or, if they do arrive at it, attaining it only to be starved or slain. As, amongst men competition is sharper between those of the same trade, so throughout the or­ ganic world the struggle is less severe between different species than between members of the same species, because these compete most fiercely for their common needs—plants for the same soil, carnivora for the same prey. But whether the battle is fought between allied or unallied species, the victory is never doubtful; it is assured to the plant or animal that has some advantage, how ■ ever slight, which its opponent lacks. Among plants growing in a dry soil, those whose leaves have thicker hairs upon them will absorb more moisture from the air than plants with less hairy leaves, and, competing successfully with these, will survive to transmit their ad­ vantageous variations. Again, such as are better able to resist the depredations of burglarious insects by protection of �96 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES thorny or prickly stems, or by nauseous taste, will thrive and multiply, while plants lacking these defences dwindle and become extinct. So with those which by showy colours of their flowers and sweeter nectar attract insects whose visits are desired as carriers of pollen from stamens to pistils. These secure propagation, while plants less attractive remain barren. The birds that are strongest on the wing reach the land whither they migrate, while the weaker perish by the way. The lions of sharper sight and more supple spring, the wolves of keener scent, secure their prey, while the feebler members starve. It is with man as with the organisms below him : the quickest in intellect, and those with greater power of endurance, distance the weak or the stupid, who fall behind, and finally slip out of the ranks altogether. Sometimes the area of struggle is nar­ rowed, and survival secured by retreat, as of the sloth to trees, and of digging and burrowing animals underground. The subtilty and variety of the condi­ tions upon which natural selection seizes escape the keenest observers. Of their success, however, in tracing the varying fortunes of species Darwin gives a strik­ ing illustration in his explanation of the absence of wild oxen and horses in Paraguay. This is due to the action of a small fly which lays its eggs in the navel of newly born calves and foals, the maggots hatched from the eggs causing the death of the young animals. Now, supposing this parasitic fly to be de­ stroyed by an insect-eating bird, oxen and horses would abound in a wild state, and, as they would eat certain plants, the vegetation would be altered, and these changes in the flora and fauna would involve changes of increasing complexity. The interrelation between the propor­ tion of old maids and an abundance of red clover is not, prima facie, quite as obvious. But it may be proved in this wise. The clover is fertilised by humblebees, the number of which is determined by the number of field-mice, which de­ stroy their nests. The number of field­ mice, again, is determined by the number of cats, and the number of these, finally, by the number of old maids who keep them ! Therefore, as red clover is excellent food for cattle, and cattle are excellent food for man, elderly spinsters are benefactors to their species ! The important part played by colour and mimicry1 in the struggle for life has been demonstrated by Darwin, Wallace, Bates,2 Belt, and other acute observers. The more closely that an animal approxi­ mates in form and hue to its surround­ ings, the easier does it escape detection by its pursuer, and the easier does it avoid the notice of the prey which it pursues. In conformity with this we find that most animals are protectively coloured, while those which are not are so constituted as to render such protection needless. As illustrative of the opera­ tion of natural selection in this matter, we may borrow an admirable example from Grant Allen’s Charles Darwin. “ In the desert, with its monotonous sandy colouring, a black insect or a white insect, still more a red insect or a blue insect, would be immediately detected and devoured by its natural enemies, the 1 This word is not used as implying conscious imitation, but as conveniently grouping re­ semblances which, in the degree that they are protective or helpful, give advantage to the individual exhibiting them. 2 Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazons Valley (Trans. Linn. Soc., November, 1861), of which Darwin says, in a letter to Bates (Az/e and Letters, ii, 391): “ It is one of the most remarkable and admirable papers I ever read . . . solving a wonderful problem.” This paper should not be allowed to lie buried in a learned society’s Transactions, for the illustrations of .mimetic analogies between members of widely distinct families and between insects and their surroundings which it gives are, as Darwin adds, “truly marvellous.” Such are those of moths, whose wings are coloured and veined like the fallen leaves on which they lie motionless, of hunting-spiders which mimic flower-buds, and of large caterpillars which resemble poisonous snakes. An abstract of the paper is given in my Memoir of Bates (pp. xxxviii-xliv) prefaced to reprint of his Naturalist on the Amazons, 1892. �THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES birds and the lizards. But any greyish or yellowish insects would be less likely to attract attention at first sight, and would be overlooked as long as there were any more conspicuous individuals the desert, the stripes upon the tiger, which, parallel with the vertical stems of bamboo, conceal him as he stealthily nears his prey, the brilliant green of tropical birds, the leaf-life form and colours of certain insects, the dried twig­ like form of many caterpillars, the bark­ like appearance of tree-frogs, the harmony of the ptarmigan’s summer plumage with the lichen-coloured stones on which it sits, the dusky colour of creatures that haunt the night, the bluish transparency of animals which live on the surface of the sea, the gravel-like colour of flat-fish that live at the bottom, and the gorgeous tints of those that swim among the coral reefs. Among the secondary causes of modifi­ cation of species among animals Darwin gives prominence to “ sexual selection,” or the struggle between males for the possession of females ; the result being that the stronger males secure mates, and transmit the qualities which have given them the mastery to their offspring. Every farmyard combat illustrates the of their own kind about for the birds and lizards to feed on. Hence in a very short time the desert would be de­ populated of all but the greyest and yellowest insects ; and among these the birds would pick out those which differed most markedly in hue and shade from the sand around them. But those which happened to vary most in the direction of a sandy or spotty colour would be most like­ ly to survive, and to become the par­ ents of future gener­ ations. Thus, in the course of long ages, all the insects which inhabit des­ erts have become sand-coloured, be­ Fig. 72.—Walking-stick Insect. cause the least sandy were perpetually picked out for truth of Gilbert White’s prose1 and destruction by their ever-watchful foes, Schiller’s poetry:— while the most sandy escaped, and Meanwhile, until Philosophy multiplied and replenished the earth Sustains the structure of the world, Her workings will be carried on with their own likes.”1 By hunger and by love, Thus, then, is explained the tawny colour of the larger animals that inhabit and among the larger animals—as stags 1 P. 97; and cf. G. A.’s art. “Mimicry,” Ency. Brit., xvi. p. 341. 1 White’s Selborne, letter xi., to Hon. Daines Barrington. D �98 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and deer, and notably sea-lions 1—the deadliest combats take place at certain seasons for possession of the females. But there is competition less fierce in character, if not less fatal to the weaker or unendowed, strength giving place to grace of form, brightness of colour,1 and 2 witchery of song, the females making choice of the male who, by his beauty of form, colour, odour, or voice, attracts them most, or who, as among the highest species, has wealth or good social position. These last condone infirmity and ugliness. It is clear that sexual selection largely explains the development of special features, which, transmitted in increasing degree through a series of generations, have contributed to the survival of the fittest. For whatever these features may be, whether weapons of defence or attack, plumage and song of birds, colour of butterflies, perfume as of the muskdeer, or acrid taste as of the toad, their presence is explained by their utility, since, as with the flowers and scents wherewith plants attract insects to secure fertilisation, the primary function of colour, form, ornament, and whatever else has given advantage to plant or animal over its competitors, is its service to the organism, and not, as man in his fond delusion has assumed, the delight or profit which it has given to him. 6. Natural selection tends to maintain 1 Cf. Elliot’s An Arctic Province, ch. x., for a vivid account of the battles between the males for priority on the breeding-grounds of the Pribylov Islands. 2 “ As colours seem to be the chief external sexual distinction in many birds, these colours do not take place till sexual attachments begin to obtain. And the case is the same in quadrupeds, among whom, in their younger days, the sexes differ but little ; but as they advance to maturity, horns and shaggy manes, beards and brawny necks, &c., &c., strongly discriminate the male from the female. We may instance still farther in our own species, where a beard and stronger features are usually characteristic of the male sex : but this sexual diversity does not take place in earlier life ; for a beautiful youth shall be so like a beautiful girl that the difference shall not be discernible.”—White’s Selborne, letter vi., to Hon. Daines Barrington. the balance between living things and their .surroundings. These surroundings change ; therefore living things must adapt themselves thereto, or perish. In treating of the obscurity which hangs around the ultimate causes of variation, stress has been laid on the ceaseless and elusively complex interplay between organisms and the medium which surrounds, quickens, and nourishes them. As Gegenbaur remarks,1 the energies which cause change in the organism either lie without it, or for the most part are to be sought for without it, the range of variation of the plant being, by reason of its fixed conditions, limited as compared with that of the locomotive animal. It has been shown already that the touch of the medium was the first quickener of variation in the rise of the earliest approach to unlikeness at the surface, as in the membranous film which envelops the lowest life-forms, and, among the higher animals, in the gradual specialisation of lines of communication —the nervous system and sense organs —with the outer world from infoldings of the skin. The diffused sensitiveness to smell, light, and sound became local­ ised, the sense of touch remaining general over the body-surface, except where horny skin is secreted. Obviously, there­ fore, the tendency to vary which inheres in living things being stimulated by interaction between them and their sur­ roundings, the degree in which variations are useful to living things—i.e., in en­ abling them to win in the universal struggle for food and place—determines, under the action of natural selection, their survival. The slow but ceaseless changes in things without have involved adaptive changes in all organisms except the lowest. Seemingly, all things remain 1 Comp. Anat. (English ed.), p/57. “ I have been led to place somewhat more value on the definite and direct action of external conditions.” Letter to Carus, May 1869, Darwin's Life and Letters, iii. 109 ; and cf. letter to Moritz Wag­ ner, October 1876, ibid., p. 159. �THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES as they were from the beginning. The range of our experience is too narrow, the time since scientific observation of nature began is comparatively so recent, the changes in living things often so beyond direct detection, that we cannot wonder at people’s reluctance to accept the theory that the countless species of plants and animals which have succeeded one another have a Common descent, through infinite modification, from structureless germs. And, in fact, not only is life vastly older than any record of it, but the fossil-yielding rocks supply no key to the origin of the leading groups, whose representative types of to-day are so little altered that every fossil as yet found can be put into existing classes. Huxley remarks that “ the whole lapse of geological time has thus far yielded not a single new ordinal type of vege­ table structure and although “ the positive change in passing from the recent to the ancient animal world is greater, it is still singularly small.”1 The variation in ordinal type of animal structure is only about ten per cent, of the whole. Yet we know that nothing is rigid; the earth records the gradual ascent of life-forms in structure, and the changes in its crust, in a scripture that cannot be broken. The agencies within, and the far more potent agencies without, that have wrought those changes, pursue without pause their slow and sometimes sudden working. The earth itself speeds through space, heedless of the freight of life that throbs and struggles on its surface, and that at last is laid to sleep in its bosom ; careens and brings the seasons in their sureness; spins and gives, unfailing, the glory of the sunrise and the sunset; and, in periodic changes of its orbit, crowns at one epoch its northern pole with vines and oaks and water-lilies, and at another epoch covers it with impassable ice. Changes of climate and level, with 1 Lay Sermons, p. 216. 99 the alterations in soil which they bring about, profoundly affect food and the power to obtain it. And the necessity for food being a strong—perhaps the strongest—stimulus to motion, the organism which the more readily adapts itself to the changed conditions, or is better equipped to resist them, wins in the struggle. The new functions to be discharged involve changes in structure, because the organs exist for the work which they have to do, not the work for the organs. Moreover, changes which arise in the structure are not limited to one part, the whole organisation being, in Darwin’s words, “so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified.” Take, for example, the growth of the deer’s antlers, which in some species attain a weight of seventy pounds in a few weeks. The increased supply of blood which this involves necessitates readjustment of circulation, and the increased weight which the skull has to bear necessitates more powerful muscles and ligaments, with increased strength of the bones to which they are attached. More food is needed to supply the energy thus expended, involving more active digestion, and therefore modification of the digestive organs. Again, in man the slow ac­ quirement of an erect position led to flattening of the feet, and to projection of the heel as support; to altered position of the head with its added weight of brain, so as to be nicely balanced on the spine,' which became peculiarly curved ; and to the readjust­ ment of a large number of muscles. Then there are the changes wrought after long lapses of time by use and disuse, in the one case leading to the development of organs, in the other case to their decline.1 “ Thus I find,” 1 The question how far use and disuse are true causes of change of organic type has long exercised the attention of biologists, some among whom, notably Professor Weismann, contend �too THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Darwin remarks, “ in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more in pro­ portion to the whole skeleton than do the same bones in the wild duck; and this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less and walking much more than its wild parents,”1 or, more correctly, its wild ancestors. But there are many changes induced in organs by their use or disuse on the part of the animal which are not transmitted ; they die with the individual in which they occur. Like mutilations of parts of the body, which are practised through successive generations of indi­ viduals, they are powerless to affect the type.. It is to natural selection that we must more often refer modifications which, appearing as relics of structure common to large groups, have a specious look of being due to individual use or disuse. Take the familiar example of the true whale. The epitome of its ancestry which the embryo presents reveals its descent from land mammals having short fore- and hind-limbs, scanty cover­ ing of hair, broad beaver-like tails, teeth of different shape, and well-developed sense-organs, especially of smell. These forefathers of the whale probably lived in marshy districts, and, being omnivorous, sought their food in both swamp and shallow water; but as conditions more and more adverse to life on land super­ vened, they were gradually modified under the action of natural selection in­ to dolphin-like creatures, living in fresh water, and at last finding their way into the ocean, from which the huge sea­ lizards of earlier epochs had disappeared, leaving these later leviathans scope ‘ ‘ to play therein.” Hence are explained the adaptive changes of structure: the forethat changes acquired by the individual are never transmitted. But the arguments as yet adduced by him leave his case not proven. The subject is, however, too technical for enlargement here. See article by the author in Chambers's Cyclop. s.v. 1 Origin opSpecies, p. 8, and cf. pp. 131, 401, 410; Animals and Plants, ii., 313, 345. limbs were modified into flippers en­ closed in a fin-like sac, but retaining the bones corresponding to like structures in other mammals, as in the arm of man, the wing of the bat, and the fore-leg of the horse. Traces of the hind-legs may be detected in a few species; the tail, which acted as a powerful swimming organ, became divided into two lobes; the head became fish-like in shape; the seven bones of the neck, common to most mammals, grew together ; the skin became hairless; and the teeth, which appear in the young of the true whale but are never cut, gave place to hanging fringes of whalebone, in the meshes of which the animal entangles the minute organisms it feeds upon. In the seal, which is the modified descendant of land flesh-feeders, the hind-legs have been developed, while the tail remains rudimentary. The explanation is that both whales and seals are the gradually modified descendants of ancestors who, in virtue of their favourable adaptation to altered conditions, survived under the agency of natural selection, while the majority, being unfit or less adapted, perished. Variety of readjustment to altered surroundings, through like causes, result­ ing in progress in some directions and in stagnation in other directions, is further evidenced in existing modifications of the common mammalian type. We find one large group—the plant-feeders— developing organs suited to their func­ tions, as teeth for grinding instead of for tearing, large stomachs, and horny or bony structures for combat, the evolution of which in the deer’s ancestry is re­ capitulated year by year in the individual from the boss to the noble branching antlers. In the flesh-feeders we find that higher intelligence which the steal­ thy or open pursuit of other animals required, economy of bulk, great muscu­ lar strength united to quickness of action, and teeth and claws adapted for attacking and readily seizing prey. In both groups we find progression of parts which in the Primates, the group �THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES including man, are well-nigh stationary. Among this group, limbs, teeth, and or­ gans of digestion have all been slightly modified, and no organs of defence or attack developed. The explanation is that these animals, being unable to com­ pete with the larger mammals, took to an arboreal life, which induced few variations of bodily structure, the most important being opposable thumbs and great toes for grasping. But the need for alertness against foes sharpened their wits, and the need of combination quickened the social instincts, so that the energy which in the flesh-feeders and the plant-feeders was stored in limb and muscle was diverted in the Primates to development of brain. They thus escaped the limitations of one condition, which determined, say, the de­ velopment of lions and rhinoceroses in a given direction, and they preserved the power to adapt themselves to very diverse conditions. Whichever among the arbo­ real creatures possessed any favourable variation, however slight, in structure of brain and sense-organs, would secure an advantage over less favoured rivals in the struggle for food and mates and elbow­ room. The qualities which gave them success would be transmitted to their off­ spring, the distance gained in one generation would be increased in the next, brain-power conquering brute force, and skill outwitting strength. And while some of them remained arboreal in habits, never moving easily on the ground, although making some ap­ proach to bipedal motion, as seen in the shambling gait of the man-like apes, others developed a mode of walking on the hind-limbs which entirely set free the fore-limbs as organs of support, and en­ abled them to be used as organs of handling and throwing. Whatever were the conditions which permitted this, the enormous advantage which it gave is obvious. It was the making of man. His bipedal and erect position involved exchange of tree-life for life on the ground, bringing him into new relations with his surroundings, and ultimately giving him the mastery over them. IOI We see in lower animals, as the ele­ phant, the monkey, the opossum, and the parrot, that their power to grasp an object by reason of their prehensile or­ gans, and thus to learn something about its nature, raises them in the scale of in­ telligence ;1 and when we find in man a yet more perfect instrument to carry out the behests of his brain, we may see in the interaction of brain and hand a main factor in his development. The struc­ tural differences between him and the man-like apes are insignificant; the impassable chasm lies in his larger and more complex thinking apparatus. The action of natural selection became re­ stricted, except in minor changes, as of the jaw, to his mental faculties. Yet Fig. 73.—Gorilla walking. (From Huxley’s Man's Place in Nature, p. 49.) even in brain-structure the differences between him and the chimpanzee are slight when compared with the differences between the brain of the chimpanzee and the lemur. It is in the deeper furrows and the more intricate convolutions that the distinction lies ; but even here the gap between civilised and savage man is greater than that between the savage and the man-like apes.2 Therefore, in fol­ lowing evolution to its highest operations and results, the comparison lies between the several races of mankind. Darwin says that he does not believe it possible 1 Of. Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, i., pp. 368-72. 2 Cf. Huxley’s Man s Place in Nattire, p. 78 ; and his Note to chap, vii, of Descent of Man. �102 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, and the rhinoceros wandering over the wide plains of Africa.” He describes the Fuegians, who rank amongst the lowest savages, as men “ whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals—men who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason.” 1 Such races are somewhat nearer to the ape than to the European, and it is from like accounts of existing savages2 that we may form a rough picture of “ primitive ” man. Doubtless he was lower than the low­ est of these—a powerful, cunning biped, with keen sense-organs (always sharper, in virtueof constant exercise, in the savage than in the civilised man, who supple­ ments them by science), strong instincts, uncontrolled and fitful emotions, small faculty of wonder, and nascent reasoning power; unable to forecast to-morrow or to comprehend yesterday, living from hand to mouth on the wild products of nature, clothed in skin or bark, or daubed with clay, and finding shelter in trees and caves; ignorant of the simplest arts, save to chip a stone missile, and perhaps to produce fire; strong in his need of life and vague sense of right to it and to what he could get, but slowly impelled by common perils and passions to form ties, loose and haphazard at the outset, with his kind, the power of combination with them depending on sounds, signs, and gestures. To quote the striking description from Lucretius, “ during the revolution of many lustres of the sun through heaven they led a life after the roving fashion of wild beasts. No one then was a sturdy Fig. 74.—Hemispheres of Brain of Chimpanzee and of guider of the bent plough, or knew how Man, showing relative proportions of the parts. to labour in the fields with iron or plant (From Huxley’s Place in Nature, p. ioi.) in the ground young Saplings. What to describe the difference between savage and civilised man. “ It is the difference a, posterior lobe ; b, lateral ventricle ; c, posterior cornu; x, hippocampus minor. 1 Naturalist s Voyage round the World, p. 504, , | fed. 1879. between a wild and tame animal; and 2 q Lumholtz’s Among Cannibals (1889), . part of the interest in beholding a savage | PP. 101, 179, 254, 271. �THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES the sun and rain had given, what the earth itself brought forth, was guerdon enough to content their hearts.”1 Such, in broad outline, was probably the general condition of the earliest known wanderers, the rude relics of whose presence are found associated with the bones of huge extinct mammals in old river beds and limestone caverns. As the successive deposits and their contents show, not till long ages had passed, bringing new and settled condi­ tions, with knowledge of agriculture, metals, and other useful arts, do we find any marked progress among mankind. Even that progress, often checked in its zigzag course, and never an unmixed good, neither synonymous, as the many think, with a nation’s imports and exports, has been confined to a minority of the species and to a narrow zone, while, com­ pared to the antiquity of man, it is but as yesterday. The enterprise of the higher races has explored and utilised large tracts, and the pressure of popula­ tion at the centres of civilisation has within quite recent periods vastly extended their periphery; but whole empires, like China, advancing to a certain stage, have through isolation and the tyranny of custom or dread of change, stagnated, whilst the lowest races have remained unmodified, like the lowest organisms, and have more or less succumbed before the imported vices and the weapons of the wrhite man. But the causes of arrest and of advance are alike complex: man, like every other living thing, is the creature of outward and inward circumstances, and many influences have worked in the shaping of his destiny. Certainly, extremes of climate have been fatal to advance beyond a given stage; it is. in the temperate zones that the incentives exist to continuous and indefinite progress. In reviewing the several operations by which species have arisen, it is essential to bear in mind that natural selection is not causal, but only directive. It is 1 De Rerum Naturd, v. 933-938 ; and cf. Odyssey, ix., 106-115. 103 powerless to bring about, the slightest variation in organisms ; it is all-powerful to preserve variations “ beneficial to the being under its conditions of life ;.... . it can do nothing until favourable individual differences occur, and until a place in the natural polity of the country can be better filled by some modification of some one or more of its inhabitants. Moreover, since it tends to establish balance between life and its surroundings, it does not imply all-round development of the higher from the lower. Its key­ note is adaptation. To quote Herbert Spencer’s remarks on the erroneous con­ ception of evolution as implying that everything has an intrinsic tendency to become something higher, “ if in the case of the living aggregates forming a species the environing actions remain constant from generation to generation, the species remain constant. If those . actions change, the species changes until it is in adjustment with them. But it by no means follows that this change in the species constitutes a step in evolution. Usually neither advance nor recession results; and often, certain previously acquired structures being rendered superfluous, there results a simpler form. Only now and then does the environing change initiate in the organism a new complication, and so produce a some­ what higher type.” 2 The parasites notably, the sea-squirts, lancelets, and the marvellous rotifers, are examples of recession. Nor . these alone; the history of mankind, with its degenerate races, Bushmen,. Fuegians, and, perhaps, Australians ; with its relics of ancient civilisations, whose art we can only feebly imitate, and whose types of manliness we cannot hope to excel; furnishes its monitions of the lethargy and love of ease which precede the downfall of peoples. 1 Origin of Species, pp. 63, 132, J37 5 An. and Pl., i. 6-8, chap, xxiv.-xxvi. ; Heilprin, pp. 125, 212. ^Principles of Sociology, p. 107 ; Huxley’s Amer. Add., p. 38; and in Letter to Lu^iDarwin’s Life and Letters, ii., 210. �io4 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Examples of persistence of type are supplied in the unaltered condition of the simplest forms since the appearance of their earliest known representatives. Their simplicity has been their salvation. A high organisation brings with it many disadvantages, for the more complex the structure the more liable is it to get out of gear. We cannot have highly con­ voluted brains, and at the same time digestive organs simple and renewable like those of the sea-cucumber. Death is the price paid for complexity. Of the propositions expounded in the present chapter this is the sum :—No two living things are exactly alike. Their inherent tendency to vary is excited by their surroundings, on which all life depends, and to changes in which they must adapt themselves or perish. Every living thing transmits its qualities, and therefore, among them, its variations, to its offspring ; the more useful the varia­ tion, the better is the plant or animal equipped in the struggle for life. For as all living things tend to multiply so rapidly that the earth would be too small in a very short time for a single species, a fierce and ceaseless struggle is waged, chiefly between the same species, for food and place. The result is that by far the larger number never reach maturity, or are killed and eaten. In the long result variations give rise to new species. The only assumption at the base of Darwin’s theory is that sufficient time has elapsed since the beginning of life for the development of all past and present species of plants and animals from a common ancestry. As to the age of the earth, more especially as a fit and possible abode of life, geologists and physicists are not agreed. The geological estimate rests chiefly upon the rates at which the deposit of sediment, or the wearing away of soil by rain and rivers, is going on; but that estimate is based upon the assumption that present changes are the measure of past changes, whereas uniform action does not exclude the possibility of great and sudden re­ volutions. On the whole, the argument from geological evidence is strongly in favour of the lapse of not much less than one hundred million years since the earliest life-forms appeared and the oldest stratified rocks began to be laid down.1. This is much longer than the physicists, reasoning from the origin and age of the sun’s heat, the rate of the earth’s cooling, and other data, are willing to allow.2 But, however the question may be finally settled, the result cannot affect the evidence in support of the theory of descent. 1 A second and recent method is to estimate the increase of the proportion of sodium in the sea by the annual supply from rivers. The numerator—the amount of salt in the sea—is known through the fair degree of uniformity in the chemical composition of the great oceans, and the denominator—the discovery by analysis of the addition made by the rivers— gives a value of about ninety million to a hundred million years. See Joly’s Radioactivity and Geology, pp. 157, 236, 275. 2 See Professor Perry’s article on “ The Age of the Earth,” Nature, January 3, 1895; Pro­ fessor Poulton’s Address in Section D, Brit. Assoc., Nature, September 27, 1896. Revised •and republished in his Essays on Evolution, 1908, Professor Perry appends this note thereto : ‘ ‘ Assume that there is adium in the sun, and this gives us almost any multiple we please to imagine of the total energy assumed by Helmholtz. We are now in a position to say that the physicist can make no calculation either as to the probable or possible age of life on the earth ” (p. 15). �Chapter X PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES The evidence supplied by living things in support of their common descent is fivefold: viz. i, by embryology, or like­ ness in their beginnings and develop­ ment; 2, by morphology, or structural likenesses; 3, by their classification; 4, by their succession in time; and 5, by their distribution in space. 1. Embryology.—-The eggs or germs from which all organisms spring are, to outward seeming, exactly alike, and this likeness persists through the earlier stages of all the higher animals, even after the form is traceable in the embryo. In proof of this Darwin quotes the following from Von Baer, the discoverer of this remarkable fact:—“ In my possession are two little embryos in spirit, whose names I have omitted to attach, and at present I am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards, or small birds, or very young mammalia, so com­ plete is the similarity in the mode of for­ mation of the head and trunk in these animals. The extremities, however, are still absent in these embryos. But even if they had existed in the earliest stage of their development we should learn nothing, for the feet of lizards and mam­ mals, the wings and feet of birds, no less than the hands and feet of man, all arise from the same fundamental form.”1 In further evidence of this interrelation of living things, their embryos, as we have seen, epitomise during development the series of changes through which the ancestral forms passed in their ascent 1 Origin of Species, p. 38S. from the simple to the complex; the higher structures passing through the same stages as the lower structures up to the point when they are marked off from them, yet never becoming in detail the form which they represent for the time being. For example, the embryo of man has at the outset gill-like slits on each side of the neck like a fish'; these give place to a membrane like that which supersedes gills in the development of birds and reptiles; the heart is at first a simple pulsating chamber like that in worms ; the back-bone is prolonged into a movable tail; the great toe is extended or opposable, like our thumbs and like the toes of apes ; the body three months before birth is covered all over with hair except on the palms and soles. At birth the head is relatively larger and the arms relatively longer than in the adult; the nose is bridgeless; both features, with others which need not be detailed, being distinctly ape-like. ■ Thus does the egg from which man springs, a structure only one hundred and twenty-fifth of an inch in size, compress into a few weeks the results of millions of years, and set before us the history of his development from fish-like and reptilian forms, and of his more immediate descent from a hairy, tailed quadruped. That which is in­ dividual or peculiar to him, the physical and mental character inherited, is left to the slower development which follows birth. Besides the past history which the embryo recapitulates, there are the rudimentary structures of which relics remain as witnesses to the former close D* �io6 PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES connection of organisms. Among these are teeth in fœtal whales, remnants of hind-limbs in certain snakes, wings under the wing-cases of insects that do things where they are found fully developed. 2. Morphology.—Large groups of species, whose habits are widely different, present certain fundamental likenesses of structure. The arms of men and apes, the fore-legs of quadrupeds, the paddles of whales, the wings of birds, the breast-fins of fishes, are constructed on the same pattern, but altered to suit their several functions. Nearly all mammals, from the long-necked giraffe to the short-necked elephant, have seven neck-bones; the eyes of the lamprey are moved by six muscles which correspond exactly to the six which work the human eye; a, gill-arches ; b, mid-brain ; c, eye ; d, nose ; e fore-brain f fore-ieg; all insects and Crustacea— g, hind-leg. moth and lobster, beetle and not fly, rudiments of pointed ears and of cray-fish—are alike composed of twenty a third eyelid in man, abortive stamens segments; the sepals, petals, stamens, in plants, as in the snapdragon, and so and pistils of a flower are all modified forth. Except as evidence of the modi­ leaves arranged in a spire. Such facts fication of life-forms in which they occur need no comment. 3. Classification.—It has been shown somewhat in detail that all plants fall into two main groups, the flowerless and the flowering, and that all animals may be reduced to three types: (1) those without body-cavity; (2) those with body-cavity; (3) those with digestive cavity separate from body-cavity. And the general likenesses of structure upon which division into sub-kingdoms is based having been given in the chapters on existing life-forms, it here suffices to repeat that the old attempts at a linear arrangement have failed, and that the only true mode of presentment, both of the life that is and that was, is that of a tree Fig. 76. —Tortoise (4 weeks). with short trunk, indicating common a, gill-arches ; b, ear ; c, eye ; d, nose ; e, fore-brain ; origin of the living from the non-living, I, fore-leg ; g, hind-leg. and divided into two large trunks repre­ from other life-forms, and of persistency senting plants and animals respectively. of type, these vestiges of organs are From each of these start large branches meaningless; the functions they once representing classes, the larger branches discharged have long ceased, being giving off smaller branches representing exercised only in other and allied living families, and so on with smaller and �PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 107 smaller branches representing orders and thing of the complicated subject of the genera, until we come to leaves as geographical distribution of plants and representing species, the height of the animals we must study the past as well branch from which they are hanging as the present, and learn from both indicating their place in the growth of geologist and astronomer, the one tell­ ing us of the shiftings of land and the great life-tree. (See Fig. 62.) 4. Succession.—Each formation has water, and the other accounting for its peculiar groups of fossil remains the great climatal changes that have representing the life-forms of the period ; swept over the globe. the older the rock, the simpler are its Every living thing has its definite organic contents ; and, what is of no area of range: the sloth is peculiar to mean importance, although transitional America ; the hippopotamus to Africa; forms are from their nature fewer and the chamois to the Alps. The higher less permanent than forms which have we climb, the hardier and more stunted arrived at balance with their surroundings, the fossil-yield­ ing rocks have disclosed the existence of several hitherto missing links between species. Reference has been made to the proofs of descent of the one-toed horse of to-day, with his knee corresponding to our wrist or ankle, from the five-toed primitive horse found in the Eocene beds of North America, and to the connecting link between birds and reptiles supplied by the archaeopteryx. To these may be added, among others, the compsognathus, with its swan-like neck, its toothed jaws, and hind-limbs Fig. 77.—A, Arm of Man. B, Fore-leg of Dog. C, Wing of Bird. on which it walked. Then there are the links between k, humerus ; r, radius ; u, ulna ; c, carpus ; m, metacarpus ; phalanges. pigs and hippopotamuses in the ano- is all vegetation; tropical plants perish plotherium; between tapirs, horses, in cold or even temperate zones; Arctic and rhinoceroses in the palaeotherium; plants wither under the equator; while a between seals and whales; between vast number of plants flourish only in sloths and bearers ; between lemurs and water, their primeval life-home. Among man-like apes ; and in the Devonian animals a few, notably man and the cat strata forms occur which are considered genus, have spread themselves well-nigh intermediate between ganoids and mud­ everywhere, but as a rule certain life­ fishes. Thus one by one the blanks are forms—and this holds good of their being filled up ; the faith of the biologist fossil representatives also—are restricted is justified by his works. to certain regions. Hence the land 5. Distribution.—Emerson says that has been divided into life-regions corre­ “ the man of this age must be matricu­ sponding to that distribution, and the lated in the university of sciences and water into life-regions measured by the tendencies flowing from all past periods ”; limits of depth at which marine forms and certainly if we would know some- are found. Speaking broadly, the �108 PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES plants and animals of countries in un­ broken connection resemble one another, while those of countries remote or cut off are unlike. But although, at first sight, climate and separation would appear to account for this, there are likenesses and unlikenesses which are not to be thus explained. In fine, ex­ ceptions meet us at every turn. Great Britain and New Zealand are much alike in general conditions, yet the life­ forms of New Zealand, now being fast supplanted by aliens, are the littlealtered survivors of plants and animals once dominant over the globe. On the Fig. 78.—Compsognathus other hand, as Mr. Wallace tells us, the Englishman visiting Japan finds its woods and fields tenanted by the sing­ ing birds familiar to him at home. Tapirs, whose origin in the north-western parts of the Old World is indicated by their fossil remains in Miocene beds, are now separated by nearly half the globe’s circumference, being found only in South America and Malacca, while the man-like apes are found only in West Africa and Borneo. But puzzling and seemingly capricious us is the distribution of life, the general causes are not far to seek. Distribution is due to the slow but ceaseless migration and transport of living things rendered necessary by their rate of increase. While climate has much to do with it in compelling organ­ isms, in proportion to their power of dispersion, to shift their quarters, the struggle for life between them has had more influence still, so that the past and present habitats of plants and animals throw welcome light not only on changes in the relations of land and water, but also on the origin of species. Where unallied forms are found on the same continent we may infer that the physical barriers between them have been permanent through long periods; where allied forms which are unable to cross the seas are found in lands now separated, as in Britain and Japan, in South Europe and North Africa, we have evidence of former union. The degree in which life-forms have been modified gives some key to the remote­ ness of that union; as, for example, when we find more ancient types in New Zealand than in Australia, and more ancient types in Australia than in Madagascar. Islands afford important aid in the study of the intricate problem of distri­ bution. They are of two kinds, continental and oceanic. The conti­ nental, as the British Isles, Japan, ancient Madagascar with its lemurs, and New Zealand with its wingless birds and Hatteria lizard, have been broken ofl from the mainland. The oceanic, as the Azores and Sandwich Islands, are of volcanic or coralline formation, and depend for their life-forms upon their relative position to the mainland, and also to the winds and £>cean currents that prevail. Exclusive of animals introduced by man, they are found destitute of frogs and other batrachians; also of mammals, bats excepted; the explanation being that sea water kills frogs and toads and their spawn, and that only flying animals can cross the ocean. For this reason bats, at least the insect-eating species, are found everywhere, except at the poles; and the range of birds, although defined, is �PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES much wider than that of all the larger and wingless land animals.1 Isolated islands like St. Helena are peopled with waifs and strays from all quarters, while in continental islands like our own the life-forms are, for the most part, identical with those of the nearest mainland. But here, again, exceptions exist. The islands of Bali and Lombok in the Malay Archipelago, although only fifteen miles apart, differ far more from each other in their birds and quadrupeds than do England and Japan, the birds being extremely unlike? As shown by the deep soundings, Bali belongs to the Indian region, and Lom­ bok to that zone of “ living fossils,” the Australian region. Australia contains only the lowest mammals, as duckbills and kangaroos—for there is little doubt that the dingo or wild dog was introduced by man—witnessing to its severance from Asia millions of years ago during the Secondary epoch. It is an ancient and little-altered fragment, preserving as in a museum the types of plants and animals which were then domi­ nant on the great shifting land areas, and from which the higher forms have been developed. Oceanic islands, with their population of birds, flying insects, and a few creep­ ing things, are the refuge spots of casta­ ways. Strange are the ways and means of dispersal. Winds waft the light seeds of plants to great distances; currents drift to far-off shores icebergs laden with earth and seeds, or masses of floating vegetation, sometimes so matted with soil as to form island rafts, with trees upstand1 Although the dispersal of the larger animals is instanced in this summary of facts of distribu­ tion, it should be added that far more striking, if less obvious, evidence could be cited from the dispersal of insects. Their great powers of flight, and their extreme lightness, cause them to be transported enormous distances by the wind; their eggs and larvae, deposited in the bark or crevices of logs, are carried with these as they float to far-off shores, while their immense antiquity largely explains the wide areas over which they range. Cf. Wallace’s Island Life, VIS 2 Ibid., p. 4. 109 ing, and carrying with them not only numbers of grubs and eggs of insects, but even large animals. Darwin foundbeetles swimming in the open ocean seventeen miles from land ; and one evening when ten miles from the Bay of San Blas, in the Pacific, the air was thick with but­ terflies—it snowed them, as the sailors Fig. 79.—Dinornis elephantopus, New Zealand. said. But the most remarkable instance cited in his Journal is the arrival of a grasshopper when the ship was three hundred and seventy miles from the coast of Africa. Birds are important agents in plant distribution, transporting seeds embedded in dirt sticking to their feet or beaks, or the barbed seeds of certain plants, as the hook-like spikes of the curi­ ous Uncinia, which cling to their feathers, or the undigested seeds and stones of fruits which are passed through their �no PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES bodies. A swift-winged bird may drop cherry-stones a thousand miles from the tree they grow on ; a hawk, in tearing a pigeon, may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it had swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of latitude. Among the many suggestive experiments which Darwin made in this matter, he cites the case of the leg of a wounded partridge to which a ball of hard earth weighing six and a half ounces adhered. The earth had been kept for three years, but when broken, watered, and placed under a bell-glass, no less than eighty-two sepa­ rate plants of about five distinct species sprang from it. Very important also, although more remote in its ultimate results, is the agency of man, especially of civilised races, in the distribution of life. Both with and without intent he distributes and destroys, as his needs or caprices demand. Clearing forest, draining lake and bog, reclaiming land from sea, or uniting ocean with ocean, he disturbs, or mingles, or kills their life-forms. He imports strange plants and noxious insects in his merchandise ; the sheep walks of the Antipodes are cursed with the fecund rabbit, and their river beds choked with our water-cress ; while the European rat has left our shores as a stowaway to oust the native rat wherever it goes, as the white man ousts the coloured man. But man blesses as well as curses ; he trans­ ports the healing cinchona plant from Peru to India, or the salmon ova from our native streams to the rivers of Australia, and to him is due the réintroduction of the horse into America, which had been extinct there long before the arrival of Columbus. “ The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seed from . the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps ; and it is a fact of very familiar observation that exotics, trans­ planted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often escape from the flower-gar­ den and naturalise themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorwaldsen were opened in the court of the museum at Copenhagen where they are deposited, the straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants be­ longing to the Roman Campagna, some of which were preserved and cultivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scandinavian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously nat­ uralised themselves about Copenhagen ” 1 It surprises one to learn how many of our familiar flowers are foreigners, which happy chance or wise intent have accli­ matised. The daisy and the violet are natives, but not the laburnum and jas­ mine, nor Sweet William with his homely cottage smell, And stocks in fragrant blow. While needless destruction has often followed in the wake of man, as he kills out of sheer wantonness, or seeks profit by gratifying the cruel freaks of fashion, his enterprise and needs have, on the other hand, rid the earth of harmful and baneful plants and animals, produced food and clothing from wild species, lus­ cious fruit from sour and dwarfed varieties, and developed domestic ani­ mals, the dog probably earliest of all, from the fierce beasts of the forest and the field. Enough has been cited to show that no preordained scheme of fitness for their several habitats has placed plants and animals where they are found. Remem­ bering what has been said about the probable polar origin of life, we are pre­ pared to find that, so far as most of the higher forms are concerned, our best authorities, with Mr. Wallace at theirhead, incline to the theory of their develop­ ment in the Euro-Asiatic continent when the temperature was comparatively warm from the pole to the antipodes. The wave of migration rolled over the Old World far south by routes now long sub­ merged, and into the New World, where other life-forms appear to have been 1 Marsh’s Man and Nature^ p. 67. �PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES Ill developed, by a northerly route. One history of the rapid rise of a. variety is among several proofs of the existence of supplied by the Anglo-American race, an old land connection between North the vigour of which may be primarily America and Europe is supplied by the due to the blending of many bloods, musk-sheep (or musk-ox), which flourish­ pre-Celtic, Celtic, Saxon, Norman, and ed ages ago in Eurasia, and. is now con­ Dane, in its British ancestry. “That many and serious objections fined to Greenland. And it is interest­ may be advanced against the theory of ing to note that the path taken by some birds in their migrations gives further clue descent with modification through varia­ to other ancient land connections.1 In­ tion and natural selection ! do not deny. capable as they are of crossing the wide I have endeavoured to give them their oceans, we find them migrating between full force.”1 The sixth, seventh, and Europe and Africa by way of Greece, tenth chapters of the “ Origin of Malta, and Gibraltar, the three points at Species” are proof of this.. Darwin which the two continents were. formerly shirked no difficulty, and in. laying united. They follow instinctively the stress upon whatever told against his route which their ancestors have taken theory he made its foundations more sure. One great, but unduly overrated, for countless seasons. Widespread as is the distribution of the stumbling-block—the absence of inter­ races of mankind, they are probably of mediate forms in the fossil-yielding rocks common origin. All of them being —has been removed by the discovery of fertile with one another, they are to be many more connecting links in the long classed as varieties of one species, whose chain of life than could be expected physical and mental differentiations from when we take into account the small their nearest congeners, the highest apes, minority of ancient forms which have had been acquired before their disper­ escaped the havoc of the past, and when sion. The modifications which exist we remember how much smaller are the have been developed through the potent chances in favour of the preservation agency of natural and sexual selection of the more fragile, rare, and unstable acting upon variations induced by transitional forms than of the species diverse conditions—conditions which which they connect. Another leading objection, drawn from have surrounded man in virtue of his migrations from pole to pole, and the barrenness of hybrids2—as, eg., of which have called his industry and the mule—loses much of its force in resource into full play. Perhaps the view of the numerous examples to the most striking illustration throughout contrary, both in plants and animals, as amongst genera of the thistle and of the 1 “A bird may travel from England to the laburnum, and as in the cases of fruitful equator without launching out and exposing hybrids of sheep and goats in Chili.3 itself to boundless seas, and that by crossing the But, as against natural selection, the water at Dover, and again at Gibraltar. . . . real difficulty lies in the interbreeding of When arrived there the birds do not—• species developed by selective breeding ‘ Ranged in figure wedge their way, from a common stock.4 For example, the . . . . and set forth different species of pigeons have been de­ Their airy caravan high over seas Flying, and over lands with mutual wing veloped from the wild rock-pigeon, and Easing their flight’ {Milton}, these are fertile with one another, which but scout and hurry along in little detached 1 Origin of Species, p. 404. parties of six or seven, and sweeping low, just 2 Animals and Plants, ii., 130-156, and ch. over the surface of the land and water, direct xix. passim. their course to the opposite continent at the 3 Haeckel’s Hist, of Creation, i., 145-149. narrowest passage they can find.”—White’s 4 For some suggestive remarks on this, see Selborne, letter ix., to the Hon. Daines Bar­ J Quarterly Review, January 1901, pp. 269, 271. rington. �112 PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES would seem to tell in favour of the fixity of species, unless the carrier, pouter, and tumbler are, after all, to be regarded only as varieties or sub-divisions of species. The matter, however, is too abstruse for these pages, and, moreover, it has no weight as against the theory of derivation. We know very little as to the complex conditions ruling fertility and barrenness; we know that the re­ productive organs are peculiarly sensitive to altered habits and surroundings; and we know, further, that it is through changes in those organs that the barriers to interbreeding have arisen, and the consequent multiplication of countless intermediate varieties been arrested. Happily, the Darwinian theory has no fatal element of rigidness in it, and those who would mould it into a dogma know not what spirit they are of. It admits of alterations in detail at the behest of fresh facts, and of such cor­ rection of proportion as time alone gives to things new and near. But the truth of the theory of which it is a subordinate part will thereby stand out the clearer, and the full accord of past and present to the oneness of things appear more manifest. So far as the doctrine of organic evolution is con­ cerned, the evidence from embryology and pateontology in support of it is so conclusive that it would remain un­ shaken if the theory of natural selection could be disproved. �Chapter XI SOCIAL EVOLUTION i. Evolution of Mind.—If the theory of evolution be not universal, the germs of decay are in it. And here we pass from what is interesting to what, is of "serious import for us, because if the phenomena of mind are not capable of the like mechanical explanation as the phenomena of stars and planets, and of vegetable and animal life, evolution remains only a speculation to fascinate the curious. It can, in that case, furnish no rule of life or motive to conduct, and man, “the roof and crown of things,” would be the sole witness against their unity and totality. If there be in him any faculty which is no part of the con­ tents of the universe, if there be anything done by him which lies outside the range of causation, then the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy falls to pieces, for on such an assumption man has the power to add to that which the physicist demonstrates can neither be increased nor lessened. The ground already covered need not be retrodden to show that man is one in ultimate beginnings, and in the stuff of which he is made, with the meanest flower that blows, and that in mode of development from the egg to the adult state there is exact likeness between him and other mammals. But some repeti­ tion of the process of mental develop­ ment from the lowest life-forms to the * highest is needful. “ Structure for structure,” remarks Pro­ fessor Huxley, “down to the minutest microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensi­ bility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or admin­ ister a narcotic, and the signs of intelli­ gence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in the normal cerebral substance of man give rise to states of conscious­ ness, the same reason exists for the belief that the modes of motion of the cerebral substance of an ape, or of a dog, produce like effects.”1 Let us begin, however, at the bottom of the life-scale. The lowest things, being organless, or alike all over, respond to touch, “ the mother-tongue of all the senses,” in every part, simply changing their shape from moment to moment. A step higher we find forms in which unlikenesses in parts begin to show themselves—eg. in the formation of a layer at the surface; and here the re­ sponses to the stimuli, as they are called, become localised, because the move­ ments set up by the stimuli take place, like all modes of motion, along the lines of least resistance. These movements give rise to changes in the structure of the organism, driving the molecules out of their places, and, following in incre­ dibly rapid succession, finally lay down permanent nerve-tracks, built up of the more sensitive parts of the skin. All sense-organs, whether the whiskers of a cat or the eye of a man, all the wondrous network of nerves and the brain itself, have thus originated. Practice makes perfect; and, as the result of their incessant repetition, the lowest and simplest nerve-actions, known as reflex, take place automatically in plants and 1 English Men of Letters, Hume, p. 105. �114 SOCIAL EVOLUTION animals. Such are the contractions of an amoeba or of the leaves of a mimosa, the shutting up of an oyster when the shell is touched, breathing, the action of the heart, winking of the eyes—in short, all actions which are performed unconsciously, and repeated in virtue of the tendency to do them being innate in the structure which each organism inherits from its ancestors. Besides these natural reflex actions, there is a group of artificial reflex actions which our higher intelligence enables us to acquire, as the arts of reading, playing instruments, &c. As every one knows, it takes a soldier a long time to learn his drill—for instance, to put himself into the attitude of “ atten­ tion ” at the instant the word of command is heard; but after a time the sound of the word gives rise to the act, whether the soldier be thinking of it or not. There is a story, which is credible enough though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner suddenly called out “ Attention ! ” whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure. The possi­ bility of all education is based upon the existence of this power, which the nervous system possesses, of organising conscious actions into more or less unconscious, or reflex, operations.1 Instinct is a higher form of reflex action. The salmon migrates from sea to river j the bird makes its nest or migrates from one zone to another by an unvarying route, even leaving its young behind to perish; the bee builds its six­ sided cell; the spider spins its web ; the chick breaks its way through the shell, balances itself, and picks up grains of corn; the new-born babe sucks its mother’s breast—all in virtue of like acts on the part of their ancestors, which, arising in the needs of the creature, and gradually becoming automatic, have not 1 Huxley’s Elementary Physiology, p. 306, varied during long ages, the tendency to repeat them being transmitted within the germ from which insect, fish, bird, and man have severally sprung.1 Touching on larger matters for a moment, even the so-called necessary truths and innate ideas of the mind, as of time and space, take their place among transmitted experiences. “ Being,” as Herbert Spencer says, “ the constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought of which it is impossible to get rid.” More than a century ago Gilbert White remarked that “ the maxim that defines instinct to be that secret influence by which every species is compelled naturally to pursue at all times the same way or track without any teaching or example, must be taken in a qualified sense, for there are instances in which instinct does vary and conform to the circumstances of place and convenience.” 2 Herein that delightful observer, perhaps without sus­ pecting what he was conceding to the brute, indicates where instinct passes into Reason. For the main difference between the two is that while the one is done because the animal cannot help doing it, and has no knowledge of the relation between the end and the means, the other is the conscious adjustment of means to ends— selection as the result of reflection. In the one there is no pause, in the other there is a measurable interval; the stimuli to action are more complex and less rapid, giving time for that perception of likenesses and unlikenesses in things which is essential to rational action. This is manifested by all animals except the lowest, which, however, form the vast majority. The latter start fully equipped for their functions : their actions are 1 An interesting illustration of this was supplied by a St. Bernard dog belonging to a relative. The dog was born in London, and taken into the country when a puppy. After a few months a sharp fall of snow happened, and “Ju,” who had never seen snow before, was frantic to get outdoors. When she was set free, she rolled in the snow, bit it, and dug it up with her claws as if rescuing some buried traveller. The same excitement was shown whenever snow fell. 2 Letter lvi., to Hon. Daines Barrington. �SOCIAL EVOLUTION reflex and unvarying from birth to death. But in the higher animals the same mental processes are apparent as in man. There is not a faculty of the human mind which is not possessed in lesser or greater degree by them ; oftenest in lesser degree, sometimes in larger degree, as in the showing forth of affection and devotion that puts man’s selfishness to shame. Where some of the highest animals approach him, although Longo intervallo, is in their passage through a period of helpless infancy, because the brain and connecting apparatus are not complete at birth ; and in this lies the explanation of the capacity for receiving instruction and for profiting by ex­ perience, which reaches its fullest devel­ opment in man. And it is because the knowledge that is gained, and the habits that are acquired, in early life abide with us, determining character, that the im­ portance to ourselves and to others . of learning what is true, and of cultivating what is good, is paramount. Vast, there­ fore, as are the differences between the highest and lowest mental actions, there is no break in the series which, starting with the reflex movements of an amoeba or of a carnivorous plant, advances along the line of animal instinct and intelli­ gence, and ends with the complex move­ ments of the brain of civilised man, with its infinite modes of response to infinite stimuli. 2. Evolution of Society.—Like every other species, man multiplies beyond the means of subsistence. Civilised races are more prolific than savage races. Under prosperous conditions they double their numbers in a quarter of a century, a rate at which the present population of the United States alone would in six hundred and fifty years cover the terraqueous globe so thickly that four individuals would have to stand on each square yard of surface.1 Consequently the mortality of the human species, though far less than that of any other animal, is still enormous. It is com­ puted that more than seven hundred million human beings are every century 1 Descent of Man, p. 44. H5 pounded back to nothingness without knowing that they ever lived, to which have to be added the vast number that die before reaching manhood, and the wholesale destruction of communities by wars, pestilences, famines, and catas­ trophes. In various ways natural selec­ tion weeds out the least fit ; and al­ though under civilised conditions the weak and diseased are coddled and even permitted to multiply their kind, this check is too local to affect the larger result, while that which the race might gam in physique by its removal is not to be compared to the loss that would ensue from the repression of mercy and sympathy. In a barbaric society, or among the civilisations where infanticide was practised, weaklings like Newton and hunchbacks like Pope would have been left to perish : modern civilisation spares them, and humanity is enriched by their genius. When the weeding process has done its utmost, there remains a sharp struggle for life between the survivors. Mans normal state is therefore one of conflict; further back than we can trace, it im­ pelled the defenceless bipeds from whom he sprang to unity, and the more so because of their relative inferiority in physique to many other animals. The range of that unity continued narrow long after he had gained lordship over the brute; outside the small combina­ tions for securing the primal needs of life the struggle was ferocious, and, under one form or another, rages along the line to this day. “There is no discharge in that war.” It may change its tactics and its weapons : among ad­ vanced nations the military method may be more or less superseded by the industrial, and men may be mercilessly starved instead of being mercifully slain ; but be it war of camps or markets, the ultimate appeal is to force of brain or muscle, and the hardiest or craftiest win. In some respects the struggle is waged more fiercely than in olden times, while it is unredeemed by any element of chivalry. Moreover, the greater strength of man’s emotions, and the persistent craving for �116 SOCIAL EVOLUTION excitement, acting upon his inherited savage instincts, have made that struggle more terrible in his case than any that rages between the lower animals. These fight for food and mates, not for the mere love of fighting. No brute ever tortured its kind or gloated over the agonies of its prey as man has tortured in fiendish glee the victims of his revenge, intolerance, and hate. True it is that peace has been wrung from pain; that war is a nation­ builder ; that slavery and superstition have been agents of progress, whereby the many, through the sacrifice of the few, have gained freedom, unity, and larger life; that in the death-struggle for food, curiosity, the mother of knowledge, has been awakened, never more to sleep; that in the fight for mates the germ of the highest and purest love of man for woman has been developed; that in the conflicts between tribes, patriotism, morals, and the hardy virtues have been evolved: but when we count the cost, all this would afford small content did we not have faith that the slow-footed years are bringing us nearer to the goal where might shall be subdued by right, and where injustice and selfishness shall be swallowed up by goodness, because this shall have become spontaneous to man. The social instincts to which his pro­ gress is due are without doubt inherited from his pre-human ancestors. “ There is,” wrote Gilbert White in 1775, “a wonderful spirit of sociality in the brute creation, independent of sexual attach­ ment ”; and Darwin remarks that “ the social animals which stand at the bottom of the scale are guided almost exclusively, and those which stand higher in the scale are largely guided, by special instincts in the aid which they give to the members of the same com­ munity ; but they are likewise in part impelled by mutual love and sympathy, assisted apparently by some amount of reason.”1 In the degree that animals are social we find them higher in the scale, as ants, bees, and wasps among insects; and among domestic animals, 1 Descent of Man, p. 109. dogs, whose wild ancestors hunted in packs, as compared with cats, which inherit the solitary and wandering habits of their wild ancestors. We do not know what the earliest social unions among mankind were like. Probably there were no family arrangements as we understand the term, but only various kinds of relations, more or less fugitive, between groups of men and women.1 The details, how­ ever, do not affect the general fact of social intercourse, in which community of interest was the binding force. Im­ petus was given to more personal and permanent relationships by the longer period of infancy in man as compared with the same period in the man-like apes, in whom, again, it is much longer than in the lower monkeys.2 For as the maternal instinct “ sublimes the passions, quickens the invention, and sharpens the sagacity of the brute creation,”3 so this period of helplessness would draw parent and child closer together, evolv­ ing love and sympathy, and develop­ ing those enduring and exalting relations of the family which widened into tribal life. Struggles against common foes brought the bravest to the front as leaders, turbulent elements within in­ volved the rule of the ablest, disputes called for the settlement of the wisest; and thus the rough foundations of law and order were laid. As the wants and capacities of the ever-increasing com­ munity multiplied, the work done by each one under rude conditions was 1 Cf., e.g., Sir A. C. Lyall’s account of the Bheels, an undoubted remnant of the aboriginal tribes of India. “ They may be taken to re­ present generally the barbarian type before the earliest civilisation had brought in ideas and prejudices about food, worship, and connubium. So far as can be ascertained, the Bheels are all subdivided into a variety of distinct groups, a few based on a reputed common descent, but most of them apparently muddled together by simple contiguity of habitation, or the natural banding together of the number necessary for maintaining and defending themselves.” Asiatic Studies, p. 160. 2 Cf. Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, ii- 342-346. 3 White’s Selborne, letter xiv., to Mr. Bar­ rington. �SOCIAL EVOLUTION divided among the many ; hence special­ isation of the people into classes, with all the complex duties of modern societies. Carlyle says that the great man shapes the age; Herbert Spencer says that the age shapes the great man. The truth lies in the mean ; the great man is the product of past tendencies and. present conditions, and he is supreme in virtue of these operating in him in higher de­ gree; hence he acts upon society for good or evil. 3. Evolution of Language, the Useful Arts, and Science— Man is markedly separate from the highest brute, riot only by his brain-power and his erect attitude, with its free command over the hands, but also by language. Not that the “ dumb ” animals, as they are called, are all voice­ less, many of them having no small or inexact gamut of sounds by which to express their thoughts and emotions. But although the love-calls of birds and the danger-cries of beasts may be not more unintelligible to us than . the language of savages like the Fuegians, which Captain Cook compared to a man clearing his throat, the distinction abides that language, as the plastic symbol, of ideas of unlimited range and complexity, marks the impassable gulf between the mental capacity of man and every other animal. Its origin lies in his need to communicate with his fellows; and but for it all attempts after social union, except of the lowest and most fleeting kind, would have been as the weaving of a rope of sand. “ Nature,” says Lucretius (v. 1028, 9), “impelled them to utter various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.”1 Words themselves reveal under analysis the history of their origin from a few simple root-sounds, which were instinctive cries or imitations of various natural noises very largely aided at the outset by signs and gestures. Speech is but one way of expressing thought; deaf mutes can converse only by gesture ; 1 On the evolution of the organs of articulate speech, see the author’s Thomas Henry Huxley, pp. 120-122. 117 to this day it is the chief mode of com­ munication between certain wandering tribes of American Indians, and among the vivacious races of Southern Europe it largely supplements talk. We can never know what the first sound-signs were like, but their choice and currency obviously depended on the success with which they conveyed the meaning of those who invented them—a principle, of course, applicable to every stage of language, from the simple names of objects with which it began to the ultimate transfer of those names to abstract ideas. For all abstract terms have a concrete origin. The words just used evidence this; abstract meaning “dragged away” and concrete “grown together.” Even the verb to be is made up of “ the relics of several verbs which once had a distinct physical significance. Be contained the idea of ‘growing’; am, art, is, and are, that of ‘ sitting ; was and were, that of ‘dwelling,’ ‘abiding.’”1 Certain it is that from mimetic sounds, with their boundless variety of modulation, there have been developed not merely the scanty and shifting speech of the lower races, but the wondrously rich, copious, and evergrowing languages of civilised races, the sound-carriers not only of man’s common wants, but of the lofty conceptions which are enshrined in prose and poetry, and without which, now made the common intellectual wealth of nations through the arts of writing and printing, how poor and dwarfed would human life have been! Language has, therefore, followed the common law of evolution in advance from the simple to the com­ plex, from nouns and verbs to the elabora­ tion of families of words and of parts of speech, with their subtile shades of meaning whereby no thought remains unexpressed. Thus does it prove itself one of the many instruments which the skill of man has perfected from raw materials as his social needs have impelled him and as his intelligence has increased. 1 Professor W.D. Whitney’s Leet, on Language, p. 115. �n8 SOCIAL EVOLUTION And the like adaptation of means to ends applies to the development of the useful arts, as well as of those arts in which the head is more concerned than the hand. The primal needs of clothing and shelter, of weapons of war and of the chase—for the sword and bow precede the spade and hammer—the need, under more settled conditions, of implements for the household and the field, set man’s wits at work to supple­ ment and improve that which nature supplies in the rough. For if he is not the only tool-user, he is the only tool­ maker among the Primates. Every instrument of his culture bears traces of its development from simpler forms : the spear and knife-blade from the sharpedged flint flake ; the saw from the jagged-edged flake ; the matchlock from the crossbow ; the warrior’s armour from the scaly hide of beasts ; the plough from the stag’s antlers or the tree branch ; the mill from pounding stones ; the ship from the scooped-out trunk ; the oar from the hands or feet as primitive paddles ; the house from the sun-baked clay hut, or, as in China, from the Tatar tent ; the pyramid from the earth mound or cairn : all art from imitation—the alphabet from picture-writing ; sculpture and painting from rude scratchings on bone and horn ; stringed instruments from the twang of the hunter’s bow; wind instruments from the blast of his horn, the “ blowing into hollow stalks from the whistling of the zephyr through the hollows of reeds ” ; melody and dance from the rude, impassioned chant of the savage, time-marked by yell and tamtam ; arithmetic from primitive per­ ception of more or less ; counting and measuring, as shown in our words cubit, ell,1 foot, hand, digit, span, fathom, and 1 Some confusion of measures of length having occurred in the reign of Henry I., he commanded that the ancient ell (Lat. ulna), which corre­ sponds to our yard, should be made of the exact length of his own arm. The span, which is nine inches, is the space from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger (Lat. digitus) when extended, or the eighth of a fathom (A.S. fœtheni, the bosom), the space to which a man’s arms can ordinarily be extended. in cognate terms of other languages, from using the fingers, toes, and other parts of the body; geometry, or landmeasuring, from early perceptions of space; all science from crude and false guesses about the nature and causes of things, from illusions of alchemist and astrologer, which made attainment of the truth more possible to chemist and astronomer; and so on through the whole range of man’s social and intel­ lectual development. 4. Evolution of Morals.—Man by himself is not only unprogressive, he is also not so much immoral as unmoral. For where there is no society there is no sin. Therefore the bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one’s fellows; the moral sense or conscience is the outcome of social relations, themselves the outcome of the need of living. The common interests which impel to combination involve praise or blame of the acts of each individual in the degree that they aid or hinder the well­ being of all—in other words, add to their pleasure or their pain; and this praise and blame constitute the moral code, the collective or tribal conscience. Society, like the units of which it is made up, has to fight for its life, and all primitive laws are laws of self-preserva­ tion. Tribal self-preservation is based on sympathy between the several members, and it is therefore the ultimate foundation of the moral sense; what­ ever is helpful to it is right, whatever is a hindrance to it is wrong. Although union involves limitation and restraint, so that the units can no longer do exactly as they like, self-interest comes into play, since a man best ensured respect for his own rights by respecting the rights of others. Society is not possible where a man is not true to his fellow; there is, as the phrase goes, honour among thieves, probably even among savages as low as the Jolas of the Gambia, every one of whom does as he likes, the most successful thief being the greatest man. In that model of sound and clear reasoning, so refreshing a I contrast to the tedious word-mongering �SOCIAL EVOLUTION 119 ancient Germans—“ Robberies beyond the bounds of each community have no infamy, but are commended as a means of exercising youth and lessening sloth ” 1 —still applies to barbaric peoples, and has its survival in the slowly decaying pre­ judices of civilised nations. Morals are relative, not absolute ; there is no fixed standard of right and wrong by which the actions of all men throughout all time are measured. The moral code advances with the progress of the race ; conscience is a growth. That which society in rude stages of culture approves, it condemns at later and more refined stages, although such is the power of custom in investing the antique with sanctity, such the per­ sistence of authority, and so deep its interest against change, that moral qualities are grafted upon acts apart from any question of their bearing upon character. Such, for example, are the prohibitions against certain foods and the commands to keep certain days sacred ; such also the tyranny of caste, as among the Bhattias of India, who regard dining at an hotel as a greater sin than murder. Among the Moham­ medan sect of the Wahhabees murder and adultery are venial offences com­ pared to the smoking of tobacco. Among many savage peoples it is worse to marry a girl within the tribe than to murder one of another tribe. Among ourselves society condones a seduction, but not a mésalliance, and forgives an offence against etiquette less readily than an act of dishonour. Although tending of late to unwise laxity towards offences for which death is the rightful penalty, the alterations in criminal codes witness to progress in morals and humaneness, and to the recognition of crime as more or less of the nature of disease. We need not go back to the time when laws punish­ ing heresy and witchcraft were in force, since during the last century people were burned to death for coining * Chap. iv. passim ; and cf. Clifford’s Lectures false money, hanged for stealing a and Essays, ii. pp. 106-176 ; Huxley’s Life and few shillings’ worth of goods, and Tetters, ii., pp. 205, 206; and Coll. Essays, vi., of most writers on ethics, the chapter on the growth of the moral sense in the Descent of Man} Darwin points out how man’s instinctive sympathy would lead him to value highly the approval of his fellows, and how his actions would be determined in a high degree by their expressed wishes; unfortunately, often by his own selfish desires. But while the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst for vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or satisfying as the higher feelings which crave for society and sympathy. And the yield­ ing to the lower, however gratifying for the moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and by resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses. It is this self-accusing feeling of remorse (liter­ ally biting again), due to power of reflectiononactionsand motives, that makes the difference so profound between man and the lower animals, whose moral sense does not advance beyond the stage which commits or avoids certain acts according as they are remembered as pleasurable or painful to the creature itself. Special value would be set by the tribe upon brave and unselfish deeds as contributing to the common weal; praise and honour would reward the doer, encouraging that love of the tribe in which lay the germ of love of country. For he who is not a good citizen cannot be a true patriot, and he who holds not his fatherland dear can never become a well-wisher to mankind. The concep­ tions which these larger interests involve are, however, of very slow growth; for a long time the feeling of rightness and wrongness was limited to acts harmful or helpful to the tribe; in fact, that which was a crime within its borders became a virtue, and even a duty, outside them. What Caesar says of the P- «39- 1 Comm., bk. vi. cap. 23. �120 SOCIAL EVOLUTION imprisoned for paltry debts, death being often the only bringer of release. Among the sights of London were the procession of condemned criminals to Tyburn every six weeks, and the auctions of negroes at the Poultry Compter. These and a hundred other barbarities went on without protest from the humane, whether Christians or non-Christians, for the collective conscience did not question their right­ ness, and their abolition was ultimately due to the efforts of individuals in whom a higher sense of human rights and duties was aroused, and through whom the general moral tone was advanced. That heightened tone, which is a yet stronger note of our time, is, in the main, due to the progress of science, using the term as including not merely knowledge of the operations of nature, but knowledge of human life as affected by divers causes, and of the community of blood in all mankind. It is this which has broken down the barriers of prejudice between the classes of each nation and between nations themselves, bringing home the force of the Italian proverb, “Tutto il mondo e paese ”—“ all the world is one country.” This larger view extends the range of human sympathy and of the service of man to his fellows, as well as to the lower animals, which that sympathy inspires. Terrible are the ills which the misuse of knowledge in the hands of the selfish and the ruffian inflicts, but these are as dust in the balance against the good which has been wrought. The conduct of a nation is no longer regulated solely by its own interests without regard to what is due to others, neither does it draw its sanction from the tribal legis­ lation of a barbaric past, but from what, after ages of dearly bought experience, has proved itself to be best for man. In this, as in aught else which endures, nothing is rigid or final. Man’s capacity can never overtake his loftiest ideals ; in their conception is the spur to their pursuit. What dead weight of care do morals, thus regarded, lift from the heart of man ! what new energy is given to his efforts ! Thought becomes fixed on the evolution of goodness instead of on the origin of evil; time is set free from useless speculation for profitable action ; evils once deemed inherent in the nature of things, and therefore irremovable, are accounted for and shown to be within our power to extirpate. For in proving the unvarying relation between cause and effect in morals as in physics, science gives the clue to the remedy for moral ills. Moreover, that which man called sin is shown to be more often due to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack of imagination, than to his wilful ness; “ evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart.” As Herbert Spencer says, “the world is governed or overthrown by feelings to which ideas serve only as guides ”;1 and the lack of imagination, which is itself largely due to defective training of the intellect, prevents a man from putting himself in the place of others, and deprives him of that sympathy which is essential to the unselfish life. Since morals are due to the social instinct, the highest morality is that wherein each one shares to the full the life of all. The terrible mass of wrong-doing can be lessened and finally removed only by sup­ pression of the over-self; by the main­ tenance of the balance between such care of oneself as shall best fit us for the service of man, and such thought for others as shall inflict on them no suffering through our selfishness, nor loss through our gain.2 The crises of history are now rare when great principles or causes, demanding the sacrifice of the individual life, are at stake, but the world has never lacked a Curtius, and the spread of the scientific spirit has not proved fatal to the heroic. Especially is science a preacher of righteousness in making clear the indis­ soluble unity between all life past, present, and to come. We are only on 1 Social Statics, quoted in Essays, iii., 69. ■2 Cf. the eloquent and stimulating chapter on “The Cultivation of Human Nature,” in Mr. Cotter Morison’s Service of-Man. �121 SOCIAL EVOLUTION the threshold of knowledge as to the vast significance of the doctrine of heredity, but we know enough to deepen our sense of debt to the past and of duty to the future. We are what our forefathers made us, plus the action of circumstances on ourselves ; and in like manner our children inherit the good and evil, both of body and mind, that is in us. Upon us, therefore, rests the duty of the culti­ vation of the best and of the suppres­ sion of the worst, so that the future of the race suffers not at our hands. More imperious is that duty since nothing— not omnipotence itself—can step in be­ tween us and the consequences of our acts. The “ forgiveness ” of which men talk shows the charity of the injured, and may win the wrong-doer to a better life ; but the thing “ forgiven ’’—who can undo its effects ?1 “ Our deeds are like the children born to us—they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never.” 1 2 Self-conquest lies in obedience, obe­ dience lies in knowledge ; and if to know that it rests with man to make or to mar the lives of others be not sufficing stimulus to learning the true that we may do the right, no other motive can avail. Whatever power the threats of punish­ ment and the promises of reward in an after life may have had in lawless and superstitious ages, they have now but the smallest effect on conduct; their remote­ ness exhausts their power, and, moreover, the belief in them is slowly decaying. For the conduct of life brief maxims are enough; all the law and command­ ments are in the golden rule; all ethics in the teaching that if man be true to him­ self he cannot be false to his fellows; while in the knowledge that life’s demands will always exceed its opportunities we may feel— How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still. 5- Evolution of Theology.—Theology may be defined as dealing with man’s re­ lations to the god or gods in whom he believes; morals, as dealing with his relations to his fellow-men. Unfortunately, the two have become a good deal mixed in the degree that con­ duct has been made to rest on supposed divine commands as to what men shall and shall not do—an assumption which serves a useful purpose as a restraint upon the brutal and ignorant, but which has been a powerful engine of terrorism in the hands of impostors and fanatics. The confusion, however, disappears when it is seen that the evolution of belief in spiritual beings is a thing apart from the evolution of morals, which, as has been shown, are based on social instincts and sympathies guided by reason and strength­ ened by inheritance and practice. For primitive theology is primitive science; it is the outcome of man’s first efforts to explain the nature of his surroundings, and of the divers influences which affect him for good, and still more for ill. At this stage of his mental growth the emotions have foremost play, because feeling precedes reason, and its exercise is more easy, its results more rapid, al­ though, on that account, less trustworthy. Moreover, the phenomena on which experience, as the sole guide to true 1 “ ‘ Do you know, Wilfrid, I once shot a little bird—for no good, but just to shoot at knowledge of things, is based, are too something. It wasn’t that I didn’t think of it— vast for a single life to compass, even were don’t say that. I did think of it. I knew it the reasoning faculty capable of dealing was wrong. When I had levelled my gun I with them. It needed the lapse of long thought of it quite plainly, and yet I drew the trigger. It dropped, a heap of ruffled feathers. time ere man found out how his senses I shall never get that little bird out of my head. tricked him at every turn, and ere he And the worst of it is, that to all eternity I can could form any conception of orderly re­ never make any atonement.’ lation in his surroundings. So far as “ ‘ But God will forgive you, Charley.’ “ ‘ What do I care for that,’ he rejoined effort to supply his lower needs sharp­ almost fiercely, ‘when the little bird cannot ened his wits, he did not go far astray; forgive me ? ’ ”—George Macdonald’s Wilfrid in his struggle against material foes the Cumbermede, p. 179. weapons of his warfare were carnal, but as 2 Romola, p. 150 (one-vol. edition). �122 SOCIAL EVOLUTION fall, and who secure dominance over their fellow-men by pretending to be the mouthpiece of the gods, to forgive sins in their name, and to make known their will. This animism, or general doctrine of spiritual agents, was largely fostered by personal experience supplied by dreams about both the dead and living, hallucin­ ations, swoons, and by the shadows or reflections which objects cast, all which seemed to witness to the existence of a second self or soul that came and went at pleasure during life, and haunted its old home after death. The burial-place became the spot where the living brought their gifts to the dread spirits of the departed, whose worship is a leading feature of barbaric religions. The grave was the cradle of beliefs about the departed; the tomb became the That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy. temple. Combined with the belief in Ever on the alert against enemies, man’s life wherever power or movement was fancy multiplied them on all sides; and manifest, these ideas have built up all since he naturally attributed passions like theologies, from the polytheistic to the his own to the unseen beings in whom he so-called monotheistic, the common believed, he dreaded “ some bringer of element in each being the ascription of that ” harm from every quarter, especially personality to unseen powers. Given from things near at hand whose dire the intellectual stage which a people has effects touched him closely, as the whirl­ reached, the character of their gods can pool and the breaker, the falling tree, be predicted, although the higher the devouring beast, or venomous reptile. theologies will retain persistent traces of Phenomena farther off and less fitful the barbaric conceptions of deity in moved him less, but although day suc­ which they arose. They are not, as ceeded night, both sun and moon were shallow carpers have argued, the in­ in turn often swallowed and disgorged genious inventions of self-seeking men ; by the black cloud-monsters, and in the they arise out of the necessity of human wake of the fire- and wind-dragons of the nature to frame an explanation of that lightning and the storm there followed which affects it deeply and constantly. Their roots draw nutriment from a destruction and death. What man fears, but is powerless to common soil; the frenzy of the savage control, he seeks to appease. Hence the and the ecstasy of the saint have a com­ prominence of devil-worship, of belief in mon base in undisciplined imagination. Theology is purified from gross concep­ baleful spirits amongst lower races; hence, likewise, the persistence of kindred tions only in proportion as it is purged of the beliefs among the ignorant in civilised false science with which, to its own hurt, countries ; hence the world-wide custom it identified itself in the past, and to the of averting the wrath of gods or of buy­ remnants of which it still clings. The ing their favour by sacrifices, smearing function of science is to clarify the mind, their images with human blood, and and to show how the beliefs of the past wreathing them with human intestines. are the myths of the present; the duty Hence, also, the rise of a special class, of theology is to readjust itself to what “ medicine-men ” and priests, into whose science proves to be true, since science hands all ghastly and ghostly functions has no facts to interpret save those which against spiritual powers he was defence­ less. Ignorance, always the mother of mystery, made him the slave of his fears. The vacuity of his mind gave admission to all the demons of panic and terror. The universal instinct of the savage leads him to ascribe an indwelling life to everything that moves, from the sun in heaven to the rustling leaves and the stones that roll from the hill-side across his path. In this he acts as we see shy­ ing horses, timid pups, and young children act, until they learn from experi­ ence what things move of their own accord and what things do not. Shake­ speare might have added Caliban to “ the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” as of imagination all compact, on whom it plays such tricks— �SOCIAL EVOLUTION man has gained from experience. Of aught else, as Omar Khayyam sings— Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it and about, but evermore Came out by the same door wherein I went. Creeds may die, rites and _ ceremonies become matters of archaeological interest, but human needs endure. Conduct is everything, because duty never lapses. Theology, uncorrected, troubles itself about the fate of a man who denies its speculative doctrines ; morals bid him remember, as the one thing needful, that what he sows he or his will reap. In the future, when it is seen that theories about gods and all other spiritual beings have nothing whatever to do with man’s duty to his fellows, theology and morals will again become distinct. In the chapters now brought to an end a vast field, the limits of which shade into the unlimited on all sides, has been roughly surveyed. We began with the primitive nebula, we end with the highest forms of consciousness; the story of creation is shown to be the unbroken record of the evolution of gas into genius. Let us epitomise in fewest words what, after all, is itself but a summary of a large subject:— 1. Description.—The universe is made up of Matter and Motion, both of which are indestructible. Matter contains above seventy so-called elementary sub­ stances, which exist in a free or combined state as solid, liquid, gaseous, or ultragaseous ; it is also present throughout space in the imponderable state known as ethereal. Motion acts in a twofold and opposite way, viz., as a pulling or combin­ ing Force, and as a pushing or separat­ ing Energy. Force inheres in matter, and acts continuously whatever the distance; Energy is both passive or stored up, and active or in a state of transfer from body to body, the sum­ total being in gradual course of transfer to the ethereal medium, where its power to do work ends. Ponderable matter is distributed throughout space in bodies of various size and density, from mole­ I23 cules to sidereal or solar systems. _ Such a system is our central sun, with his company of planets and their moons, and of comets and other wandering gaseous bodies. The planet on which we live is a nearly spherical body, threefourths of which is covered by water, and the whole surface enveloped by an atmosphere. So far as its rind or crust can be examined, it is found to consist of solid rocks, the lowest of which have been fused by fire, and the uppermost laid down by water. The water-laid rocks contain the remains of plants and animals which have escaped the general destruction of organisms in the wear and tear which the rocks undergo ceaselessly. The simplest fossils are found in the oldest deposits, the more advanced in the newer, and so on in ascending scale until we reach the newest deposits, which contain the highest forms. The existing species of plants and animals comprise the lowest and simplest, which have probably persisted throughout the entire life-period, as well as the highest and some others, the vast majority of intermediate species having died out. All plants and animals are made of the same materials, and have to do the same work. That work is threefold : to feed, to multiply their kind, and to respond to the outer world. The cells of which every part of every plant and animal is builtup are variously altered and arranged according to the way in which that work is more or less divided amongst the several parts. The main difference between plant and animal is in the mode of feeding; the plant is alone able, in virtue of its chlorophyll, to convert the inorganic into the organic, and the animal therefore depends on the plant for its food supply. 2. Explanation.—At the beginning of the present universe Matter was a diffused vaporous mass, unequally dis­ tributed throughout space. Force, act­ ing on the unstableness of that mass, drew its particles together, and the re­ sulting collision set free the stored-up Energy, which became active in two I forms: the molar, causing the several �124 SOCIAL EVOLUTION masses into which the particles had gathered to spin round in an orbit; and the . molecular, causing a swing-like motion among the particles, which motion was diffused as light and heat. The masses into which the primitive nebula was broken up became sidereal or solar systems, each of which, like the parent mass, threw off, as it was indrawn towards its common centre of gravity, masses which became the planets, and from these were detached, in like manner, masses which became moons. Comets and other fugitive bodies are probably due to expulsion. Both in its shape and general condition the earth gives proof of this passage from the gaseous to the solid state. As one of the smaller bodies, it long ago ceased to shine by its own light, but a vast period elapsed before it became cool enough to form a crust and to condense the vapours that swathed it into primeval oceans. The simplest compounds of its elements were formed first, the combinations becoming more and more complex until they reached that subtile form which is the physical basis of life, and which, starting in water as a structure­ less jelly, has reached its fullest develop­ ment in man. The organic is depen­ dent upon the inorganic ; and mind, as a special form of life, takes its place as the highest product of the action of Motion upon Matter. From the action of mind on mind has arisen that social evolution to which, in a supreme degree, is owing the progress of man in know­ ledge, whereby he has subdued the earth. The ultimate transference of all energy to the ethereal medium involves the end of the existing state of things. But the ceaseless redistribution of matter, forceclasped and energy-riven, involves the beginning of another state of things. So the changes are rung on evolution and dissolution, on the birth and death of stellar systems—gas to solid, solid to gas, yet never quite the same—mighty rhythmic beats of which the earth’s cycles, and the cradles and graves of her children, are minor rhythms. Thus the keynotes of Evolution are Unity and Continuity. All things are made of the same stuff differently mixed, bound by one force, stirred by one energy in divers forms. Force inheres in matter; Energy acts through it; therefore both have neither more nor less claim to objective reality than matter. And as science tends to the conclusion that all kinds of matter are modifications of one primal element, and that all modes of motion are varied operations of one power, perchance these three— Matter, Force, and Energy—are one. But into these and like speculative topics Evolution does not intrude. Dealing with processes, and not with the nature of things in them­ selves, it is silent concerning any theories that may be formulated to gratify man’s insatiate curiosity about the whence and whither. Since it can throw no light on the genesis of matter, or on the origination of motion, or on the beginnings of life or of mind, it leaves great and small alike a centre of impenetrable mystery. It may correct, but it does not repress, the imagination ; neither does it impose any limits on thought; it has a larger charity for superstition than for irreverence; it has no shibboleths the surrender of which can awaken dread; its temper is not aggressive; it seeks to inform life with the love of truth, and to let the facts which it reveals, and whose significance is its chief concern, win their way on their own merits; since “ a dogma learned is only a new error—the old one was perhaps as good; whereas a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession.” Our sense of the beauty of Nature is not dimmed by fuller and truer knowledge of her works and ways; the more we feel our oneness with her the more do we desire to know her as she is ; while all that it really suffices us to learn for the discharge of life’s duties, and all the motive that is needed to impel us thereto, is supplied in the theory which has so profoundly and permanently affected every department of human thought. �INDEX Bats, 67 ; range of, 108 Beetles, 31, 65, 109 Belemnites, 33, 35 Abdomen, 64 Bilateral symmetry, 62, 68 Affinity, 14 Birds, 39, 71, 72 ; as seed dispersers, Algte, 49, 87 109; descent, 34 ; migration, 73, Allen, Grant, 55, 84, 88, 93, 96 in ; reptile-like, 34, 35 ; wingless, Alpha Centauri, 18 108 Amber, 30 America, connection of, with Europe, Blastosphere, 90 Blood, 59 ; salt in, 63 hi Body-cavity, 106 Ammonites, 31, 33, 35 Brain, 46, 63, 66, 67, 70; and thought, Amoeba, 46, 47, 58, 63 86 Amphibians, 71 Brain of ant, 66 ; of man and apes, Amphioxus, 70 102 Ancestor-worship, 122. Breathing, organs of, 6,3 Anemone, 61 Bronze, age of, 41 Angiosperms, 36, 51 Bryophytes, 49 Animals, chlorophyllian, 87. Animals and plants, priority of, 87 ; Buffon, 83 Butler, Samuel, 92 unity, 45, 46 Butterflies, 34 Animism, 122 Annelida, 56, 62 Annulosa, 62 Ant, brain of, 66 ; high social stage C 66 Apes, man-like, 38, 75, iox Apes and man, brain of, 102 ; skele­ Ceesar, 119 tons, 75 Calamite, 32 Aphis, increase of, 95 Cambrian system, 28 Aqueous action, 23, 37, 4? Carbon, 14, 30 Archtean, 23, 27 Carbonic acid, 45, 47 Archaeopteryx, 34 Carboniferous system, 31 Arnold, Matthew, 49 Carlyle, 117 Arthropoaa, 56, 63 Carnivora, 38, 100 Artificial selection, 94 Carnivorous plants, 45 Arts, evolution of, 117 Carpenter, W. B., 27 Ascidians, 69 Catkin-bearers, 52 Ascidians and vertebrates, 56 Cell, 48, 50, 85, 89; division, 90; Asteroids, 20 layers, 90 ; wall, 48 Atmosphere, earth’s, 21 Cellulose, 70 Atomic theory, 13 Chalk, deposit of, 28 Atoms, 12, 16; divisibility of, 12; Charing Cross, fossils at, 40 unity, 13 ; weight and volume, 13 Australia, ancient life-forms of, 73, Chemical attraction, 14 Chimpanzee, 102 109, TIO Chlorophyll, 47, 55, 87 Azoic, 83 Chromosphere, 20 Cilia, 49, 59, 60, 70 Classification, 106 B Cleveite, 20 Clifford, Prof., 119 Backbone, 68, 70 Clio borealis, 67 Bacon, Lord, 48 Club-mosses, 29, 30, 50 Balanoglossus, 56, 69 Coal, nature of, 30 Balfour, F. M., 58 Cockroaches, 31 Bali, 109 Cod, increase of, 95 Bates, H. W., 34, 66, 96 Coelenterata, 56 A Cohesion, 14 Colonial animals, 59 Colour, nature of, 54; order of, in flowers, 55 Colouring, protective, 96 Comets, 19, 21 Compsognathus, 108 Conifers, 51 Conscience, 118 Consciousness, mystery of, 58, 86 Conservation of energy, 15, 113 Cook, Captain, 117 Cope, Prof., 67, 85 Coral, 45, 6x Corolla, 52 Cotyledon, 51 Crabs, 33 Cretaceous system, 35. 37, 67 Crime, nature of, 120 Crocodiles, 38 Crown bearers, 52 Crust of the earth, 21 Crustacea, 29, 64 Cryptogams, 49 Crystals, formation and growth of, 85 Cuttle-fish, 33 Cycads, 33, 35, 51 D Daisy, 52 Dalton, 13 Darwin, 9, 46, 66, 73, 74, 96, 100, 102, 105, 109, in, 119 Darwin’s theory, summary of, 104 Dawson, Sir J. W., 27 Death, 104 Deer, antlers of, 100 Degeneration, 70, 103 Descartes, ix Descent of Man, 66, iox, 116, 119 Descent, 47; objections to theory of, hi Desmids, 45, 49 Devonian system, 30, 50 Diamond, 55, 85 Diatoms, 28, 45, 59 Digestive organs, 45, 57, 58, 61, ,69 Dipnoi, 71 Distribution of life-forms, 107 Dog, embryo of, 92, 106 �12Ô INDEX Duck-bill, 73 Dyer, Thiselton, 84, 88 E Earth, age of, 104; core of, 22 ; destiny, 82 ; evolution, 82 Echidna, 73 Echinodermata, 56 Egg, of mammal, 14 ; of man, X05 Electrons, 12, 16 Elements, 12, 13 ; classification of, 13 ; common origin, 13 ; periodic law, x3 Elephant, increase of, 95 Embryo stage, 90 Embryology, 105 Emerson, 10 107 Endogens, 36 Energy, 14, 78 ; active and passive, 15 ; definition of, 15, 78 ; molar and molecular, 79 ; tabular summary, 16 Eocene strata, 37 Eozoon Canadense, 27 Epochs, Geological, 23 Ether, 12, 14, 16 Ethereal medium, 16, 79 Europe, connection of, with America, in Evolution, conditions of, inorganic, 79 ; summary, 123, 124 Evolution of earth, 82; gods, 122 ; language, 117; man, 105 ; mind, 113; morals, 118 ; plant and animal, 84; society, 115 ; solar system, 80 ; stellar systems, 79; theology, 121 Exogens, 36 Eye, evolution of, 62; of Hatteria, 69 ; of sea-squirt, 70 F Faraday, 13 Females, fights for, 97 Ferns, 30, 50, 51 Fertilisation, 53 Fishes, 71 ; embryo of, 92 Fiske, 116 Fission, 48 Flints, chipped, 39, 40 Flowers, earliest, 55 ; essential parts of, 53 ; fertilisation, 53 ; function, 52 . Fly, increase of, 95 Flying lizards, 34 Foraminifera, 27, 50 Force, definition of, 14, 78; tabular summary, 16 Fossils, 24, 25 Frog, 68, 69, 71, 108 Fruits, function of, 55 Fuegians, 103, 117 Fungi, 46, 50, 88 Geikie, 22, 23, 27 Gemmation, 48 Geological record, gaps in, 24, 29 Germ-cell, 48, 90 Gills, 71, 105 Gill-slits in man, 105 ; sea-squirts, 70 Glacial epoch, 36 Gods, evolution of, 122 Gorilla, 101 Gravitation, 14 Gymnosperms, 50 H Hæckel, 90, hi Hair, 72 Hand, importance of, 101 Hatteria lizard, 69 Head, 63, 108 Heart, 63, 72 Helium, 20 Helmholtz, 11, 79 Heredity, 121 Hermaphrodite, 52 Honey, 53 Hooker, Sir J. D., 9, 84 Horse, ancestor of, 38, 107 Horsetails, 50 Huggins Sir W., 20, 81 Huxley, Prof., 10, 33, 47, 48, 75, 86, 88, 91, 101, 104, 113 Hybrids, iix Hydra, 60 Hydrocarbon, 47, 55, 87 Hydrogen, 12, 13, 14, 15 I Ice, action of, 39 Igneous rocks, 23 Infancy, period of, 66, 114, 116 Infanticide, 114 Infusoria, 59, 87 Inorganic evolution, 79 Insects, 30, 64, 66 Insect-fertilisation, 53 Instinct, 114 Intermediate forms, 34, 107 Invertebrates, 56 Iron, age of, 41 Islands, 108 Island. Life, 109 J Japan, 108 Jeevine, 71 Jelly-fish, 60 Jolas, 118 Jupiter, 21, 81 Jurassic system, 33, 34, 37, 66 K G Galapagos Islands, 9 Ganglia, 62, 70 Ganoids, 29, 35 Gaseous state of matter, 12 Gases, solidifying of, 16 Gas-tar, products of, 31 Gastrula, 90 Gegenbaur, 98 Khayyam, Omar, 123 Kinetic energy, forms of, 15, 16 L Labyrinthodonts, 31 Lancelet, 56, 70 Language, evolution of, 1x7 Lankester, Prof. Ray, 70, 71, 87 Laplace, 81 Laurentian system, 27 Laws, changes in, 119 Leaf-forests, age of, 23 Leaf-insects, 97 Lemuroids, 38 Lemurs, 77 Lichens, 50 Life, characteristics of, 86; chemistry, 85 ; mystery of origin, 85 ; regions, 88 ; unity, 45 Life-forms, present, 44; distribution of, 107 ; succession, 107 Light, 18, 54 Limbs, 68, 71 Limestone, 37 Liquids, compression of, 16 Littoral life-region, 87 Living _ things, composition of, 85 ; functions, 57 Lizards, flying, 33 Lobsters, 33 Lockyer, Sir J. Norman, 81 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 12 Lombok, 109 Lubbock, Sir John (Avebury, Lord), Lucretius, 102, 117 Lunar craters, 22 Lungs, development of, 71 Lyall, Sir A. C., 116 M Maccabees, Book of, 11 Macdonald, G., 121 Madagascar, 109 Malic acid, 51 Malthus, 92 Mammals, 33, 49; age of, 37, 73 Mammoth, 40 Man, ancestors of, 73 ; development, 105 ; _ embryo, 92, 105, 106 ; erect position, xoi; increase, 95 ; 1 primi­ tive,’ 102 ; races, 75 ; remains, 39 Man, action of, on nature, x xo; on species, 94 Man and apes, brain of, 102 ; skeleton, 75 Mankind, races of, 75 ; struggles, 115 ; unions, xx6 Mars, 2i Marsh, G. P., 110 Marsupials, 33, 34, 74 Mates, fights for, 97 Matter, distribution of, x8 ; states of, 12 ; tabular summary, 16 Measuring, 1x8 Medusae, 60 Mendelejeff, 13 Metamorphic rocks, 23, 32 Meteoritic theory, 81 Meteors, 21 Metazoa, 56 Micropyle, 51 Migration, 73, 1x1, 114 Mimicry, 96 Mind, evolution of, 113 Mind and body, connection of, 86 Miocene system, 38, 83 Molar energy, 79 Molecular attraction, 14 ; energy, 79 Molecules, 12, 14, 15, 16, 49; rate of motion, 15 ;size, 14 ; spaces between, 16 Mollusca, 29, 56, 66 ; importance of fossil, 37 Moneron, 56, 63 Monotremes, 73 Moon, condition of, 21 ; craters of, 22 Morals, evolution of, xr8 �Ï27 INDEX Plants, action of green, 30 ; adapta­ tion of, to insects, 53 ; carnivorous, 45 ; defensive structures, 54 ; dis­ persal, 109 ; fossil coal, 31 ; increase, 95 ; locomotive, 45 ; one-seed-leaved, 51 ; sensation of, 44 ; sex in, 53 ; two-seed-leaved, 52 Plants or animals, priority of, 89 ; unity of, 45, 46 Pleistocene, 40 Plesiosaurus, 33 Pliocene gravels, flints in,. 39. Polar region, origin of life in, 25, 83, no Pollen, 51, 52, 53 N Polyps, 60 Porifera, 59 Natural selection, 94-971 objections Post-Pliocene system, 74 to, in Potential energy, 15 Nature, action of man on, 94 Pouch-bearers, 74 Nautiluses, 67 Poultry Compter, 120 Nebular theory, 79 Priests, 122 Nebulae, 19 Primary Epoch, 23, 281 3°, 43 Neck bones, 106 Primates, 38, 77, 100 Neptune, discovery of, 13 “ Primitive ” man, 102 Nerves, function of, 57 ; origin, 57 Primordial element, 13 Nervous system, 45, 46, 58, 62, 67, 69, Proctor, R.A., 19, 81 98, 113 Prohibitions, social, 119 New Zealand, 108, 109 Protein, 47 Newlands, 13 Protoplasm, 45, 47, 50, 58, 85 Newton, Sir I., 9, 16, 85 Protozoa, 56, 89 Nitrogen, 14, 21 Prout, 13 North Polar regions, origin of life in, Pseudopods, 57 25, 83, no Pteridophytes, 49 Notochord, 70 Pterodactyl, 34 Nucleolus, 48 Nucleus, 48, 89 Nummulites, 36 Nutrition, 87 Morison, J. Cotter, 188 Morphology, 106 Morula, 91 Moseley, Prof., 64, 87 Mosses, 50 Motion, 12, 14, 78 Mountains, origin of, 37 Mouth, 62 Mud-fish, .35 Musk-sheep, in Q Quaternary Epoch, 40 Quatrefages, M. de, 39 O R Oceans, permanence of deep, 28 Old maids and clover, 96 Radiant energy, 20 Old Red Sandstone system, 30 Radio-activity, 81 Oligocene system, 38 Radium, 12, 13, 20, 81 Opossums, 33 Reason, 114 Orbital motion, energy of, 79 ! Reflex action, 46, 114 Organic compounds, 85 ! Reproduction, 46 Organisms, rate of increase of, 95 i Reptiles, 31, 33, 71 Organs, 48 ; prehensile, 101 : Rhinoceroses, 39 Origin of Species, 9, 93, 95, 100, 103, Right and wrong, 119 105, in ! Rock, definition of, 23 Ornithorhynchus, 73 1 Romola, 121 Ovary, 51 Roscoe, Sir H., 45 Owen, Sir R., 38 Rotifers, 64 Oxygen, 14, 21, 45 Rudimentary structures, 106 Oysters, 31, 67 S P Paget, Sir J., 46 Parasites, T03 Rear] oyster, 67 Periodic law, 13 Peripatus, 64 Persistence of force, 15 Petals, 51 Phanerogams, 49, 50 Photosphere, 20 Pines, 51 Pistils, 49, 51, 53 Placentals, 38, 74 Planets, orbits of, 20, 80 ; origin, 80 Plant-feeders, 100 Sachs, 85, 87 St. Helena, 109 Saporta, Comte de, 83 Saturn, 80 Savage man, 102 Science, evolution of, 118 Science and theology, 122 Scorpions, 29, 31 Sea-cucumber, 61 ; — lilies, 29 ; —• lizards, 33 ; — mats, 67 — mosses, 67 ; — slugs, 67 ; — squirts, 69; — urchins, 61 Secondary Epoch, 31, 43 Seeds, dispersal of, 109 Segments, 68 Selection, artificial, 94 ; — natural, 94 Senses, unity of, 57 Sex, importance of, 53; — in plants, 53 Sexual selection, 97 Sharks, 35, 68 Shell-fish, 37 Sidereal system, structure of, 19 Silures, 27 Silurian system, 29 Simple forms, persistence of, 27 Sin, 118 Skin, evolution of nerves, &c., from, 58, 72 Skull, development of, 68 Soap-bubble, thickness of, 14 Social evolution, 113 Social instinct, growth of, 116 Society, evolution of, 115 Sodium, 12, 13 Solar system, contents of, 20 ; evolu­ tion of, 80 Sorby, H. C., 14 Soul. 86 Soul and brain, 86 Southern hemisphere, 84 Space, distribution of matter in, 18 Species, origin of, 93-104 Spectrum of stars, 80 Spencer, Herbert, 11, 58, 92, 101, 117, 120 Spencer, W. B., 69 Sperm-cell, 48, 90 Spider, 31 ; web of, 65 Spine, development of, 70 Spirits, belief in, 122 Sponges, structure of, 29, 45, 59, 87 Sprengel, Conrad, 54 Stamens, 49, 52, 53 Star-fish, 61 Stars, conditions of, 18; distance of nearest, 18; double, 18 ; fixed, 18 ; structure of, 18 Stellar systems, evolution of, 79 Stone Age, Old, 41 Stone Age, Newer, 41 Strata, thickness of, 23 Stratified rocks, 23, 26, 36 Structure, changes of, 99 Structures, rudimentary, 106 Struggle for life, 95, 97, 115 Succession of life-forms, 107 Sun, contents of, 20; rotation, 20 ; volume, 20, 81 Sundew,46 Sun-spots, 20, 21 Sun and planets, common origin of, 80 T Tadpole, 70, 71 Tapirs, 38 Teeth, 72 Teleost fishes, 38 Tertiary Epoch, 36, 43 Thallophytes, 49 Theology, evolution of, 121 Theology and science, 122 Thorium, 81 Tissues, 48 Tortoise, embryo of, 106 Touch, 98, 113 Tree fern, 32 Trees, earliest true, 36 Triassic system, 33 Tribal conscience, 118 Tridacna, 67 Trilobites, 29, 31 Tulloch, Principal, 86 Tunicata, 69 �INDEX 128 Turtles, 38 Tyburn, 120 U Ultimate causes, mystery of, 11, 124 Ultra-gaseous state of matter, 12 Unstratified rocks, 23 Uranium, 81 Use and disuse, 99 V Vallisneria spiralis, 52 Variations, 91; transmission of, 94 Varieties, 93 Venus’s flower-basket, 59 ; — fly-trap, 46 Vermes, 63 Vertebrates, 45, 56, 64, 67 Vulcanic action, 23, 37, 42 Von Baer, 105 W Walking-stick insects, 97 Wallace, A. R., 81, 84, 96, 109 War, 116 Water, 12, 13, 14, 21, 63, 85, 87 Water in living matter, 60 Weismann, 99 Whales, 38 ; development of, 100 White’s Selborne, 55, 96, 98, nr, 114, 116 Whitney, W. D., 117 Wiedersheim, 9r Wind-fertilisation, 53 Wings, 65 Wolff, 54 Worm, segment of, 63 Y Yellow stamens, 55 �R.P.A. PUBLICATIONS Pioneer Humanists. Being Critical Revaluations: Historical and Ideal. Studies of Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft. By J. M. Robert­ son. 407 pp.; cloth, 6s. net, by post 6s. 4d. Courses of Study. By John M. Robertson. New, revised and enlarged, edition, viii+ 540 pp. ; cloth, 6s. net, by post 6s. 6d. Christianity and Mythology. By J. M. Robertson. New, revised and expanded, edition, xxiii + 496 pp.; cloth, 5s. net, by post 5s. 5d. Pagan Christs : Studies in Com­ parative Hierology. By John M. Robertson. Second, revised and enlarged, edition, xxvi + 456 pp. ; cloth, 5s. net, by post 5s. ¿d. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The story of creation : a plain account of evolution Description An account of the resource Edition: New edition, revised Place of publication: London Collation: 128 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. Series title: R.P.A. Cheap Reprints Series number: No. 14 Notes: Published for the Rationalist Press Association. First published in 1888. First published by the RPA in 1904. Printed in double columns. Includes bibliographical references. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Clodd, Edward [1840-1930] Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Watts & Co. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1910 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA234 N129 Subject The topic of the resource Creationism Evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The story of creation : a plain account of evolution), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Evolution NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/c3a5a24de421adda81e6eb91276794bc.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=FHkaAhXVGgXMKVOLoTSUEcP8-fRzLZc9bt2%7Er4jrW%7Eote-gUBURTPsKvTyO46QB6zqtD8q3gs0k4g9gmIhwF7BUCSJOLH5T3WeAmsvwHBj3%7Evf1vJweEANQyRxO9VLjEtYtwR%7EFPWz74JvJAECgpEmBXOno1XPGJUJKIiwD9ThvwQOvyjwSfy6Vux3QNxm%7Ef8OCjb0FvettXPCvmiESeVvZAuDGYRq-MBT75xnzUKew02zlGBb6rb5V9hTF5pj7FctcWvdtbrSFW1YgHubuKBXfWeqtxqSmMluC50TiSoVZykW9478EZ09oyZxYGPfyQWeX8eu1n38pXx2ZFhmJFbA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM cfa9aec6b19986b374ef0749b3c5969c PDF Text Text 64- pp. It Pamphlets for the Million—No. 8 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION By ERNST HAECKEL London : WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. ' k 1d. v �THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED. Chairman : Edward Clodd Honorary Associates : Alfred William Benn Hypatia .Bradlaugh Bonner Sir Edward Brabrook, C. B. George Brandes Dr. Charles Callaway Dr. Paul Carus Prof. B. H. Chamberlain Dr. Stanton Coit ' W. W. Collins F. J. Gould Prof. Ernst Haeckel Leonard Huxley Joseph McCabe Eden Phillpotts John M. Robertson Dr. W. R. Washington SullivanProf. Lester F. Ward Prof. Ed. A. Westermarck Secretary and Registered Offices: Charles E. Hooper, Nos. 5 & 6 Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C. How to Join and Help the R.P.A. The minimum subscription to constitute Membership is 5s., renewable in January of each year. A form of application for Membership, with full particulars, including latest Annual Report and specimen copy of the Literary Guide (the unofficial organ of the Associa­ tion), can be obtained gratis on application to the Secretary. Copies of new publications are forwarded regularly on account of Members’ sub­ scriptions, or a Member can arrange to make his own selection from the lists of new books which are issued from time to time. To join the Association is to help on its work, but to subscribe liberally is of course to help more effectually. As Subscribers of from 5s. to 10s. and more are entitled to receive back the whole value of their subscriptions in books, on which there is little if any profit made, the Association is dependent, for the capital required to carryout its objects, upon subscriptions of a larger amount and upon donations and bequests. Ube Uitcravv Guide (the unofficial organ of the R. P. A.) is published on the 1st of each month, price 2d., by post 2.Jd. Annual subscrip­ tion : 2S. 6d. post paid. The contributors comprise the leading writers in the Rationalist Movement,, including Mr. Joseph McCabe, Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner, Mr. F. J. Gould, Mr. Charles T. Gorham, Dr. C. Callaway, Mr. A. W. Benn, and “ Mimnermus.” SPECIMEN COPY POST FJIEE. London : Watts & Co., 17 Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, E.C. �NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY Pamph lets for the Million—No 8. ERNST HAECKEL, Professor at Jena University LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION A POPULAR RETROSPECT AND ---------------- SUMMARY--------------- - ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. — 1912 �PAMPHLETS FOR THE MILLION ALREADY ISSUED 1. Why I Left the Church. 6. Liberty of Man, Woman, By Joseph McCabe. 48 and Child. By Colonel pp.; id. R. G. Ingersoll. 48 pp.; id. 2. Why Am I An Agnostic? 7. The Age of Reason. By By Colonel R. G. Ingersoll. Thomas Paine. 124 pp.; 2d. 24 pp.; ¿d. 8. Last Words on Evolu­ 3. Christianity’s Debt to tion. By Prof. Haeckel. Earlier Religions. By 64 pp.; id. P. Vivian. (A Chapter from 9. Science and the Purpose The Churches and Modern of Life. By Fridtjof Thought.') 64 pp.; id. Nansen. 16 pp.; |d. 4. How to Reform Mankind. 10. The Ghosts. By Colonel By Colonel R. G. Ingersoll. R. G. Ingersoll. 32 pp.; id. 24 pp.; |d. 11. The Passing of Histo­ 5. Myth or History in the rical Christianity. By Old Testament? By S. Rev. R. Roberts. 16 pp.; Laing. 48 pp.; id. ¿d. �INTRODUCTION Not very long ago the sensational announcement was made that Professor Haeckel had abandoned Darwinism and given public support to the teaching of a Jesuit writer. There was something piquant in the suggestion that the “Darwin of Germany ” had recanted the conclusions of fifty years of laborious study. Nor could people forget that only two years before Haeckel had written with some feeling about the partial recantation of some of his colleagues. Many of our journals boldly declined to insert the romantic news, which came through one of the chief international press agencies. Others drew the attention of their readers, in jubilant editorial notes, to the lively prospect it opened out. To the many inquiries addressed to me as the “apostle of Professor Haeckel,” as Sir Oliver Lodge dubs me in a genial letter, I timidly represented that even a German reporter sometimes drank. But the correction quickly came that the telegram had exactly reversed the position taken up by the great bio­ logist. It is only just to the honourable calling of the reporter to add that, according to the theory current in Germany, the message was tampered with by subtle and ubiquitous Jesuitry. Did they not penetrate even into the culinary service' at Hatfield? I have pleasure in now introducing the three famous lec­ tures delivered by Professor Haeckel at Berlin, and the reader will see the grotesqueness of the original announce­ ment. They are the last public deliverance that the aged professor will ever make. His enfeebled health forbids us to hope that his decision may yet be undone. He is now condemned, he tells me, to remain a passive spectator of the tense drama in which he has played so prominent a part for half a century. For him the red rays fall level on the scene and the people about him. It may be that they light up too luridly, too falsely, the situation in Germany; but the reader �4 INTHOD UCTION will understand how a Liberal of Haeckel’s temper must feel his country to be between Scylla and Charybdis—between an increasingly clear alternative of Catholicism or Socialism— with a helmsman at the wheel whose vagaries inspire no confidence. The English reader will care to be instructed on the anti­ thesis of Virchow and Haeckel which gives point to these lectures, and which is often misrepresented in this country. Virchow, the greatest pathologist and one of the leading anthropologists of Germany, had much to do with the inspir­ ing of Haeckel’s Monistic views in the ’fifties. Like several other prominent German thinkers, Virchow subsequently abandoned the positive Monistic position for one of agnos­ ticism and scepticism, and a long and bitter conflict ensued. It is hardly too much to say that Virchow’s ultra-timid reserve in regard to the evolution of man and other questions has died with him. Apart from one or two less prominent an­ thropologists, and the curious distinction drawn by Dr. A. R. Wallace, science has accepted the fact of evolution, and has, indeed, accepted the main lines of Haeckel’s ancestral tree of the human race. The lectures are reproduced here not solely because of the interest aroused in them by the “Jesuit” telegram. They contain a very valuable summary of his conclusions, and include the latest scientific confirmation. Rarely has the great biologist written in such clear and untechnical phrases, so that the general reader will easily learn the outlines of his much-discussed Monism. JOSEPH McCABE. �CONTENTS PAGE Introduction.......................................................................... CHAPTER I The Controversy about Creation . Evolution and Dogma 7 CHAPTER II The Struggle Genealogical Tree over our Our Ape-Relatives and the Vertebrate-Stem 27 CHAPTER III The Controversy over the The Ideas of Immortality and God 5 Soul .... 47 ��LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION CHAPTER I The Controversy about Creation EVOLUTION AND DOGMA f HE controversy over the idea of evolution is a prominent feature in the mental life of the nineteenth century. It is true'that a few great thinkers had spoken of a natural evolu­ tion of all things several thousand years ago. They had, indeed, partly investigated the laws that control the birth and death of the world, and the rise of the earth and its inhabitants; even the creation-stories and the myths of the older religions betray a partial influence of these evolutionary ideas. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the idea of evolution took definite shape and was scientifically grounded on various classes of evidence ; and it was not until the last third of the century that it won general recognition. The intimate connection that was proved to exist between all branches of knowledge, once the continuity of historical development was realised, and the union of them all through the Monistic philosophy, are achievements of the last few decades. The great majority of the older ideas that thoughtful men had formed on the origin and nature of the world and their own frame were far removed from the notion of “ self­ development.” They culminated in more or less obscure \ creation-myths, which generally put in the foreground the idea of a personal Creator. Just as man has used intelligence and design in the making of his weapons and tools, his houses and his -boats, so it was thought that the Creator T 7 �8 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION had fashioned the world with art and intelligence, according to a definite plan. Among the many legends of this kind the ancient Semitic story of creation, familiar to us as the Mosaic narrative, but drawn for the most part from Baby­ lonian sources, .has obtained a very great influence on Euro­ pean culture owing to the general acceptance of the Bible. The belief in miracles, that is involved in these religious legends, was bound to come in conflict, at an early date, with the evolutionary ideas of independent philosophical research. On the one hand, in the prevalent religious teaching, we had the supernatural world,the miraculous, teleology : on the other hand, in the nascent science of evolution, only natural law, pure reason, mechanical causality. Every step that was made by this science brought into greater relief its incon­ sistency with the predominant religion.1 If we glance for a moment at the various fields in which the idea of evolution is scientifically applied we find that, firstly, the whole universe is conceived as a unity; secondly, our earth; thirdly, organic life on the earth; fourthly, man, as its highest product; and fifthly, the soul, as a special • immaterial entity. Thus we have, in historical succession, the evolutionary research of cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. The first comprehensive idea of cosmological evolution was put forth by the famous critical philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in 1755, in the great work of his earlier years, General Natural History of the Heavens, or an Attempt to Conceive and to Explain the Origin of the Universe mechanically, according to the Newtonian Laws. This remarkable work appeared anonymously, and was dedicated to Frederick the Great, who, however, never saw it. It was little noticed, and was soon entirely forgotten, until it was exhumed ninety years afterwards by Alexander von Humboldt. Note par1 The word “evolution” is still used in so many different ways in various sciences that it is important to fix it in the general significance which we here give it. By “evolution,” in the widest sense, I understand the unceasing “ mutations of substance,” adopting Spinoza’s fundamental conception of substance; it unites inseparably in itself “ matter and force (or energy),” or “nature and mind” ( = the world and God). Hence the science of evolution in its broader range is “the history of substance,”/ which postulates the general validity of “ the law of substance.” In the latter are combined “the law of the constancy of matter” (Lavoisier, 1789) and “the law of the conservation of energy” (Robert Mayer, 1842), however varied may be the changes of 'form of these elements in the world-process. Cf. Chapter XII. of The Riddle. �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 9 ticularly that on the title-page stress is laid on the mechanical origin of the world and its explanation on Newtonian prin­ ciples ; in this way the strictly Monistic character of the whole cosmogony and the absolutely universal rule of natural law are clearly expressed. It is true that Kant speaks much in it of God and his wisdom and omnipotence ; but this is limited to the affirmation that God created once for all the unchangeable laws of nature, and was henceforward bound by them and only able to work through them. The Dualism which became so pronounced subsequently in the philosopher of Koenigsberg counts for very little here. The idea of a natural development of the world occurs in a clearer and more consistent form, and is provided with a firm mathematical basis, forty years afterwards, in the re­ markable Mécanique Céleste of Pierre Laplace. His popular Exposition du Système du Monde (1796) destroyed at its roots the legend of creation that had hitherto prevailed, or the Mosaic narrative in the Bible. Laplace, who had become Minister of the Interior, Count, and Chancellor of the Senate, under Napoleon, was merely honourable and consistent when he replied to the emperor’s question, “What room there was for God in his system? ” : “Sire, I had no need for that un­ founded hypothesis.” What strange ministers there are sometimes ! 1 The shrewdness of the Church soon recog­ nised that the personal Creator was dethroned, and the creation-myth destroyed, by this Monistic and now generally received theory of cosmic development. Nevertheless it maintained towards it the attitude which it had taken up 250 years earlier in regard to the closely related and irrefutable system of Copernicus. It endeavoured to conceal the truth as long as possible, or to oppose it with Jesuitical methods, 1 Certain orthodox periodicals have lately endeavoured to deny this famous atheistical confession of the great Laplace, which was merely a candid deduction of his splendid cosmic system. They say that this Monistic natural philosopher acknowledged the Catholic faith on his death-bed ; and in proof of this they offer us the later testimony of an Ultramontane priest. We need not point out how uncertain is the love of truth of these heated partisans. When testimony of this kind tends to “the good of religion” (i.e., their own good), it is held to be a pious work (pia fraus). On the other hand, it is interesting to recall the reply of a Prussian Minister of Religion, Von Zedlitz, 120 years ago, to the Breslau Consistory, when it urged that “ those who believe most are the best subjects.” He wrote in reply: “His majesty [Frederick the Great] is not disposed to rest, the security of his State on the stupidity of his subjects.” �I LAS! WORDS ON EVOLUTION and finally it yielded. If the Churches now silently admit the Copernican system and the cosmogony of Laplace and have ceased to oppose them, we must attribute the fact, partly to a feeling of their spiritual impotence, partly to an astute calculation that the ignorant masses do not reflect on these great problems. In order to obtain a clear idea and a firm conviction of this cosmic evolution by natural law, the eternal birth and death of millions of suns and stars, one needs some mathematical training and a lively imagination, as well as a certain com­ petence in astronomy and physics. The evolutionary process is much simpler, and more readily grasped in geology. Every shower of rain or wave of the sea, every volcanic eruption and every pebble, gives us a direct proof of the changes that are constantly taking place on the surface of our planet. However, the historical significance of these changes was not properly appreciated until 1822, by Karl von Hoff of Gotha, and modern geology was only founded in 1830 by Charles Lyell, who explained the whole origin and composition of the solid crust of the earth, the formation of the mountains, and the periods of the earth’s development, in a connected system by natural laws. From the immense thickness of the stratified rocks, which contain the fossilised remains of extinct organisms, we discovered the enormous length—running into millions of years—of the periods during which these sedimentary rocks were deposited in water. Even the duration of the organic history of the earth—that is to say, the period during which the plant and animal popu­ lation of our planet was developing—must itself be put at more than a hundred million years. These results of geology and paleontology destroyed the current legend of the six days’ work of a personal Creator. Many attempts were made, it is true, and are still being made, to reconcile the Mosaic supernatural story of creation with modem geology.1 All these efforts of believers are in vain. We may say, in fact, that it is precisely the study of geology, the reflection it entails on the enormous periods of evolution, and the habit of seeking the simple mechanical causes of their constant changes, that contribute very considerably to the advance of 1 See, for instance, Moses and Geology, or Harmony of the Bible with Science, by Samuel Kinns (1882). In this work the pious Biblical astronomer executes the most incredible and Jesuitical manoeuvres in order to bring about an impossible reconciliation between science and the Biblical narrative. �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 11 enlightenment. \et in spite of this (or, possibly, because of this), geological instruction is either greatly neglected or entirely suppressed in most schools. It is certainly emin­ ently calculated (in connection with geography) to enlarge the mind, and acquaint the child with the idea of evolution. An educated person who knows the elements of geology will never experience ennui. He will find everywhere in sur­ rounding nature, in the rocks and in the water, in the desert and on the mountains, the most instructive stimuli to reflection. The evolutionary process in organic nature is much more difficult to grasp. Here we must distinguish two different series of biological development, . which have only been brought into proper causal connection by means of our biogenetic law (1866); one series is found in embryology (or ontogeny), the other in phylogeny (or race-development). In Germany “evolution” always meant embryology, or a part of the whole, until forty years ago. It stood for a micro­ scopic examination of the wonderful processes by means of which the elaborate structure of the plant or animal body is formed from the simple seed of the plant or the egg of the bird. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the erroneous view was generally received that this marvellously complicated structure existed, completely formed, in the simple ovum, and that the various organs had merely to grow and to shape themselves independently by a. process of “evolution ” (or unfolding), before they entered into activity. An able German scientist, Caspar Friedrich Wolff (son of a Berlin tailor), had already shown the error of this “pre­ formation theory ” in 1759. He had proved in his disserta­ tion for the doctorate, that no trace of the later body, of its bones, muscles, nerves, and feathers, can be found in the hen’s egg (the commonest and most convenient object for study), but merely a small round disc, consisting of two thin superimposed layers. He had further showed that the various organs are only built up gradually out of these simple elements, and that we can trace, step by step, a series of real new growths. However, these momentous dis­ coveries, and the sound “theory of epigenesis ” that he based on them, were wholly ignored for fifty years, and even re­ jected by the leading authorities. It was not until Oken had re-discovered these important facts at Jena (i<3o6), Pander had more carefully distinguished the germinal layers (1817), t 1 �12 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION and finally Carl Ernst von Baer had happily combined ob­ servation and reflection in his classical Animal Embryology (1828), that embryology attained the rank of an independent science with a sound empirical base. A little later it secured a well-merited recognition in botany also, especially owing to the efforts of Matthias Schleiden of Jena, the distinguished student who provided biology with a new foundation in the “cell theory ” (1838). But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that people gener­ ally recognised that the ovum of the plant or animal is itself only a simple cell, and that the later tissues and organs gradually develop from this “ elementary organism ” by a repeated cleavage of, and division of labour in, the cells. The most important step was then made of recognising that our human organism also develops from an ovum (first dis­ covered by Baer in 1827), in virtue of the same laws, and that its embryonic development resembles that of the other mammals, especially that of the ape. Each of us was, at the beginning of his existence, a simple globule of protoplasm, surrounded by a membrane, about jT^of an inch in diameter, with a firmer nucleus inside it. These important embryo­ logical discoveries confirmed the rational conception of the human organism that had been attained much earlier by com­ parative anatomy : the conviction that the human frame is built in the same way, and develops similarly from a simple ovum, as the body of all other mammals. Even Linné had already (1735) given man a place in the mammal class in his famous System of Nature. ^Differently from these embryological facts, which can be directly observed, the phenomena of phylogeny (the develop­ ment of species), which are needed to set the former in their true light, are usually outside the range of immediate ob­ servation. What was the origin of the countless species of animals and plants? How can we explain the remarkable relationships which unite similar species into genera and these into classes? Linné answers the question very simply with the belief in creation, relying on the generally accepted Mosaic narrative: “There are as many different species of animals and plants as there were different forms created by’ God in the beginning.” The first scientific answer was given in 1809 by the great French scientist, Lamarck. He taught, in his suggestive Philosophie Zoologique, that the resem­ blances in form and structure of groups of species are due to �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 13 real affinity, and that all organisms descend from a few very simple primitive forms (or, possibly, from a single one). These primitive forms were developed out of lifeless matter by spontaneous generation. The resemblances of related groups of species are explained by inheritance from common s:em-forms; their dissimilarities are due to adaptation to different environments, and to variety in the action of the modifiable organs. The human race has arisen in the same way, by transformation of a series of mammal ancestors, the nearest of which are ape-like primates. These great ideas of Lamarck, which threw light on the whole field of organic life, and were closely approached by Goethe in his own speculations, gave rise to the theory that we now know as transformism, or the theory of evolution or descent. But the far-seeing Lamarck was—as Caspar Friedrich Wolff had been fifty years before—half a century before his time. His theory obtained no recognition, and was soon wholly forgotten. . It was brought into the light once more in 1859 by the genius of Charles Darwin, who had been born in the very year that the Philosophic Zoologique was published. The substance and the success of his system, which has gone by the name of Darwinism (in the wider sense) for forty-six years, are so generally known that I need not dwell on them. I will only point out that the great success of Darwin’s epochmaking works is due to two causes : firstly, to the fact that the English scientist most ingeniously worked up the em­ pirical material that had accumulated during fifty years into, a systematic proof of the theory of descent; and secondly, to the fact that he gave it the support of a second theory of his own, the theory of natural selection. This theory, which gives a causal explanation of the transformation of species, is what we ought to call “ Darwinism ” in the strict sense. . We cannot go here into the question how far this theory, is justi­ fied, or how far it is corrected by more recent theories, such as Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm (1B44), or De Vries s theory of mutations (1900). Our concern is rather, with the unparalleled influence that Darwinism, and its application to man, have had during the last forty years on the whole pro­ vince of science; and at the same time, with its irreconcil­ able opposition to the dogmas of the Churches. The extension of the theory of evolution to man was., natur­ ally, one of the most interesting and momentous applications �U LA S 7' WORDS ON EVOLUTION of it. If all other organisms arose, not by a miraculous/ creation, but by a. natural modification of earlier forms of life,/ the presumption is that the human race also was developed by/ the transformation of the most man-like mammals, the primates of Linné—the apes and lemurs. This natural infer­ ence, which Lamarck had drawn in his simple way, but Da?- • win had at first explicitly avoided, was first thoroughly estab­ lished by the gifted zoologist, Thomas Huxley, in his th/ee lectures on Man s Place in Nature (1862). He showed tnat this “ question of questions ” is unequivocally answered/ by three chief witnesses—the natural history of the anthropoid apes, the anatomic and embryological relations of man tp the animals immediately below him, and the recently discovered fossil human remains. Darwin entirely accepted these con­ clusions of his friend eight years afterwards, and, in his twovolume work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection (1871), furnished a number of new proofs in support of the dreaded “descent of man from the ape.” I myself then (1874) completed the task I had begun in 1866, of determining approximately the whole series of the extinct animal an­ cestors of the human race, on the ground of comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology. This attempt was improved, as our knowledge advanced, in the five editions of my Evolution of Man. In the last twenty years a vast literature on the subject has accumulated. I must assume that you are acquainted with the contents of one or other of these works, and will turn to the question, that especially engages our attention at present, how the inevitable struggle between these momentous achievements of modern science and the dogmas of the Churches has run in recent years. It was obvious that both the general theory of evolution and its extension to man in particular must meet from the first with the most determined resistance on the part of the Churches. Both were in flagrant contradiction to the Mosaic story of creation, and other Biblical dogmas that were in­ volved in it, and are still taught in our elementary schools. It is creditable to the shrewdness of the theologians and their associates, the metaphysicians, that they at once rejected Darwinism, and made a particularly energetic resistance in their writings to its chief consequence, the descent of man from the ape. This resistance seemed the more justified and hopeful as, for seven or eight years after Darwin’s appear­ ance, few, biologists accepted his theory, and the general �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION i5 attitude amongst them was one of cold scepticism. I can veil testify to this from my own experience. When 1 first openly advocated Darwin’s theory at a scientific congress at Stettin in 1863, I was almost alone, and was blamed by the great majority for taking up seriously so fantastic a theory, “fee dream of an after-dinner nap,” as the Göttinger zoo­ logist, Keferstein, called it. lhe general attitude towards Nature fifty years-ago was so different from that we find everywhere to-day, that.it is difficult to convey a clear idea of it to a young scientist or philosopher. The great question of creation, the problem how the various species of plants and animals came into the world, and how man came into being, did .not exist yet in exact science. There was, in fact, no question of it. Seventy-seven years ago Alexander yon Humboldt de­ livered, in this very spot, the lectures which afterwards made up his famous work, Cosmos, the Elements, of a Physical Description of the World. As he touched, in passing, the obscure problem of the origin of the organic population of our planet, he could only say resignedly : “ The mysterious and unsolved problem of how things came to be does not belong to the empirical province of objective research, the description of what is.” It is instructive to find Johannes Muller, the greatest of German biologists in the ^nineteenth century, speaking thus in 1852, in his famous essay, On the Generation of Snails in Holothurians ” : The entrance of various species of animals into creation is certain it is a fact of paleontology; but it is supernatural as long as this entrance cannot be perceived in the act and become an element of observation.” I myself had a number of remark­ able conversations with Müller, whom I put at the head of all my distinguished teachers, in the summer of 1854. His lec­ tures on comparative anatomy and physiology—the. most illuminating and stimulating I ever heard—had captivated me to such an extent that I asked and obtained his permission to make a closer study of the skeletons and other preparations in his splendid museum of comparative anatomy (then in the right wing of the buildings of the Berlin University), and to draw them. Müller (then in his fifty-fourth year) used to spend the Sunday afternoon alone in the museum. He would walk to and fro for hours in the spaoious rooms, his hands behind his back, buried in thought about the mysterious affinities of the vertebrates, the “ holy enigma ” of which was �16 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION so forcibly impressed by the row of skeletons. Now and again my great master would turn to a small table at the side J at which I (a student of twenty years) was sitting in the angly of a window, making conscientious drawings of the skulls oJ mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. / I would then beg him to explain particularly difficult poin/s in anatomy, and once I ventured to put the question : “Myst not all these vertebrates, with their identity in internal skeleton, in spite of all their external differences, have come originally from a common form? ” The great master nodded his head thoughtfully, and said : “Ah, if we only knew that ! If ever you solve that riddle, you will have accomplished a supreme work.” Two months afterwards, in September, I^54> J had to accompany Müller to Heligoland, and le/rned under his direction the beautiful and wonderful inhabitants of the sea. As we fished together in the sea, and caugnt the lovely medusæ, I asked him how it was possible to explain their remarkable alternation of generations ; if the medusæ, from the ova of which polyps develop to-day, must not have come originally from the more simply organised polypi? To this precocious question, I received the same resigned answer: “Ah, that is a very obscure problem ! We know nothing whatever about the origin of species.” i Johannes Müller was certainly one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. He takes rank with Cuviei, Baer, Lamarck, and Darwin. His insight was profound and pene­ trating, his philosophic judgment comprehensive, ^nd his mastery of the vast province of biology was enormous. Emil du Bois-Reymond happily compared him, in his fine com­ memorative address, to Alexander the Great, whose kingdom was divided into several independent realms at his death. In his lectures and works Müller treated no less than Jour dif­ ferent subjects, for which four separate chairs were founded after his death in 1858—human anatomy, physiology, patho­ logical anatomy, and comparative anatomy. In fact, we ought really to add two more subjects—zoology and embryo­ logy. Of these, also, we learned more from Müller’s classic lectures than from the official lectures of the professors of those subjects. The great master died in 1858, a few months before Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace made their first communications on their new theory of selection in the Journal of the Linnæan Society. I do not doubt in the least that this surprising answer of the riddle of creation would �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 17 have profoundly moved Muller, and have been fully admitted by him on mature reflection. To these leading- masters in biology, and to all other anatomists, physiologists, zoologists, and botanists up to 1858, the question of organic creation was an unsolved problem; the great majority regarded it as insoluble. The theologians and their allies, the metaphysicians, built triumphantly on this fact. It afforded a clear proof of the limitations of reason and science. A miracle only could account for the origin of these ingenious and carefully designed organisms; nothing less than the Divine wisdom and omnipotence could have brought man into being. But this general resignation of reason, and the dominance of supernatural ideas which it encouraged, were somewhat para­ doxical in the thirty years between Lyell and Darwin, between 1830 and 1859, since the natural evolution of the earth, as conceived by the great geologist had come to be universally recognised. Since the earlier of these dates the iron necessity of natural law had ruled in inorganic nature, in the formation of the mountains and the movement of the heavenly bodies. In organic nature, on the contrary, in the creation and the life of animals and plants, people saw only the wisdom and power of an intelligent Creator and Con­ troller; in other words, everything was ruled by mechanical causality in the inorganic world, but by teleological finality in the realm of biology. Philosophy, strictly so called, paid little or no attention to this dilemma. Absorbed almost exclusively in metaphysical and dialectical speculations, it looked with supreme contempt or indifference on the enormous progress that the empirical sciences were making. It affected, in its character of “purely mental science,” to build up the world out of its own head, and to have no need of the splendid material that was being laboriously gathered by observation and experiment. This is especially true of Germany, where Hegel’s system of “ absolute idealism ” had secured the highest regard, particu­ larly since it had been made obligatory as “the royal State­ philosophy of Prussia ”—mainly because, according to Hegel, “ in the State the Divine will itself and the monarchical con­ stitution alone represent the development of reason; all other forms of constitution are lower stages of the development of reason.” Hegel’s abstruse metaphysics has also been greatly appreciated because it has made so thorough and consistent �18 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION a use of the idea of evolution. But this pretended “ evolution of reason ” floated far above real nature in the pure ether of the absolute spirit, and was devoid of all the material ballast that the empirical science of the evolution of the world, the earth, and its living population, had meantime accumulated. Moreover, it is well known how Hegel himself declared, with humorous resignation, that only one of his many pupils had understood him, and this one had misunderstood him. From the higher standpoint of general culture the difficult question forces itself on us : What is the real value of the idea of evolution in the whole realm of science? We are bound to answer that it varies considerably. The facts of the evolution of the individual, or of ontogeny, were easy to observe and grasp : the evolution of the crust of the earth and of the mountains in geology seemed to have an equally sound empirical foundation; the physical evolution of the universe seemed to be established by mathematical specula­ tion. There was no longer any serious question of creation, in the literal sense, of the deliberate action of a personal Creator, in these great provinces. But this made people cling to the idea more than ever in regard to the origin of the countless species of animals and plants, and especially the creation of man. This transcendental problem seemed to be entirely beyond the range of natural development; and the same was thought of the question of the nature and origin of the soul, the mystic entity that was appropriated by meta­ physical speculation as its subject. Charles Darwin suddenly brought a clear light into this dark chaos of contradictory notions in 1859. His epoch-making work, The Origin of Species, proved convincingly that this historical process is not a supernatural mystery, but a physiological phenomenon; and that the preservation of improved races in the struggle for life had produced, by a natural evolution, the whole wondrous world of organic life. To-day, when evolution is almost universally recognised in biology, when thousands of anatomic and physiological works are based on it every year, the new generation can hardly form an idea of the violent resistance that was offered to Darwin’s theory and the impassioned struggles it provoked. In the first place, the Churches at once raised a vigorous protest; they rightly regarded their new antagonist as the deadly enemy of the legend of creation, and saw the very foundations of their creed threatened. The Churches found a powerful I i ? | I 1 i; 1 I : I | i I I j �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 19 ally in the dualistic metaphysics that still claims to represent the real “ idealist philosophy ” at most universities. But most dangerous of all to the young theory was the violent re­ sistance it met almost everywhere in its own province of em­ pirical science. The prevailing belief in the fixity and the independent creation of the various species was much more seriously menaced by Darwin’s theory than it had been by Lamarck’s transformism. Lamarck had said substantially the same thing fifty years before, but had failed to convince through the lack of effective evidence. Many scientists, some of great distinction, opposed Darwin because either they had not an adequate acquaintance with the whole field of biology, or it seemed to them that his bold speculation ad­ vanced too far from the secure base of experience. When Darwin’s work appeared in 1859, and fell like a flash of lightning on the dark world of official biology, I was engaged in a scientific expedition to Sicily and taken up with a thorough study of the graceful radiolarians, those won­ derful microscopic marine animals that surpass all other organisms in the beauty and variety of their forms. The special study of this remarkable class of animals, of which I afterwards described more than 4,000 species, after more than ten years of research, provided me with one of the solid foundation-stones of my Darwinian ideas. But when I re­ turned from Messina to Berlin in the spring of i860, I knew nothing as yet of Darwin’s achievement. I merely heard from my friends at Berlin that a remarkable work by a crazy Englishman had attracted great attention, and that it turned upside down all previous ideas as to the origin of species. I soon perceived that almost all the experts at Berlin—chief amongst them were the famous microscopist, Ehrenberg; the anatomist, Reichert; the zoologist, Peters; and the geologist, Beyrich—were unanimous in their condemnation of Darwin. The brilliant orator of the Berlin Academy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, hesitated. He recognised that the theory of evolution was the only natural solution of the problem of creation; but he laughed at the application of it as a poor romance, and declared that the phylogenetic inquiries into the relationship of the various species had about as much value as the research of philologists into the genea­ logical tree of the Homeric heroes. The distinguished botanist, Alexander Braun, stood quite alone in his full and warm assent to the theory of evolution. I found comfort �20 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION and encouragement with this dear and respected teacher, when I was deeply moved by the first reading of Darwin’s book, and soon completely converted to his views. In - Darwin’s great and harmonious conception of Nature, and his convincing establishment of evolution, I had an answer to all the doubts that had beset me since the beginning of my biological studies. My famous .teacher, Rudolf Virchow, whom I had met at Wurzburg in 1852, and was soon associated with in the most friendly relations as special pupil and admiring assist­ ant, played a very curious part in this great controversy. I am, I think, one of those elderly men who have followed Virchow’s development, as man and thinker, with the greatest interest during the last fifty years. I distinguish three periods in his psychological metamorphoses. In the first decade of his academic life, from 1847 to 1858, mainly at Wurz­ burg, he effected the great reform of medicine that culminated brilliantly in his cellular pathology. In the following twenty years (1858—1877) he was chiefly occupied with politics and anthropology. He was at first favourable to Darwinism, then sceptical, and finally rejected it. His powerful and determined opposition to it dates from 1877, when, in his famous speech on “The Freedom of Science in the Modern State,” he struck a heavy blow at that freedom, denounced the theory of evolution as dangerous to the State, and demanded its exclusion from the schools. This remarkable metamorphosis is so important, and has had so much influ­ ence, yet has been so erroneously described, that I will deal with it somewhat fully in the next chapter, especially as I have then to treat one chief problem, the descent of man from the ape. For the moment, I will merely recall the fact that in Berlin, the “metropolis of intelligence,” as it has been called, the theory of evolution, now generally accepted, met with a more stubborn resistance than in most of our other leading educational centres, and that this opposi­ tion was due above all to the powerful authority of Virchow. We can only glance briefly here at the victorious struggle that the idea of evolution has conducted in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The violent resistance that Darwinism encountered nearly everywhere in its early years was paralysed towards the end of the first decade. In the years 1866—1874 many works were published in which not only were the foundations of the theory scientifically strength­ �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 21 ened, but its general recognition was secured by popular treatment of the subject. I made the first attempt in 1866, in my General Morphology, to present connectedly the whole subject of evolution and make it the foundation of a consistent Monistic philosophy; and I then gave a popular summary of my chief conclusions in the ten editions of my History of Creation. In my Evolution of Man I made the first attempt to apply the principles of evolution thoroughly and consistently to man, and to draw up a hypothetical list of his animal ancestors. The three volumes of my Systematic Phylogeny (1894—1896) contain a fuller outline of a natural classification of organisms on the basis of their stem-history. There have been important contributions to the science of evolution in all its branches in the Darwinian periodical Cosmos, since 1877; and a number of admirable popular works helped to spread the system. However, the most important and most welcome advance was made by science when, in the last thirty years, the idea of evolution penetrated into every branch of biology, and was recognised as fundamental and indispensable. Thousands of new discoveries and observations in all sections of botany, zoology, protistology, and anthropology, were brought for­ ward as empirical evidence of evolution. This is especially true of the remarkable progress of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology, but it applies also to physiology, chorology (the science of the distribution of living things), and oecology (the description of the habits of animals). How much our horizon was extended by these, and how much the unity of our Monistic system gained, can be seen in any modern manual of biology. If we compare them with those that gave us extracts of natural history forty or fifty years ago, we see at once what an enormous advance has taken place. Even the more remote branches of anthropological science, ethnography, sociology, ethics, and jurisprudence, are entering into closer relations with the theory of evolution, and can no longer escape its influence. In view of all this, it is ridiculous for theological and metaphysical journals to talk, as they do, of the failure of evolution and “the death­ bed of Darwinism.” Our science of evolution won its greatest triumph when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, its most powerful opponents, the Churches, became reconciled to it, and endeavoured to bring their dogmas into line with it. A �22 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION number of timid attempts to do so had been made in the preceding ten years by different freethinking theologians and philosophers, but without much success. The distinction of accomplishing this in a comprehensive and well-informed manner was reserved for a Jesuit, Father Erich Wasmann of Luxemburg. This able and learned entomologist had already earned some recognition in zoology by a series of admirable observations on the life of ants, and the captives that they always keep in their homes, certain very small insects which have themselves been curiously modified by adaptation to their peculiar environment. He showed that these striking modifications can only be rationally explained by descent from other free-living species of insects. The various papers in which Wasmann gave a thoroughly Darwinian explanation of the biological phenomena first appeared (1901—1903) in the Catholic periodical, Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, and are now collected in a special work entitled, Modern Biology and the Theory of Evolution. This remarkable book of Wasmann’s is a masterpiece of Jesuitical sophistry. It really consists of three entirely different sections. The first third gives, in the introduction, what is, for Catholics, a clear and instructive account of modern biology, especially the cell-theory, and the theory of evolution (chapters i.—viii.). The second third, the ninth chapter, is the most valuable part of the work. Ilj has the title: “The Theory of Fixity or the Theory of Evolution?” Here the learned entomologist gives an interesting account of thè results of his prolonged studies of the morphology and the cecology of the ants and their captives, the myrmecophilae. He shows impartially and convincingly that these complicated and remarkable phenomena can only be explained by evolution, and that the older doctrine of the fixity and independent creation of the various species is quite untenable. With a few changes this ninth chapter could figure as a useful part of a work by Darwin or Weismann or some other evolutionist. The succeeding chapter (the last third) is flagrantly inconsist­ ent with the ninth. It deals most absurdly with the application of the theory of evolution to man. The reader has to ask himself whether Wasmann really believes these confused and ridiculous notions, or whether he merely aims at befogging his readers, and so preparing the way for the acceptance of the conventional creed. Wasmann’s book has been well criticised by a number of �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 23 competent students, especially by Escherich and France. While fully recognising his great services, they insist very strongly on the great mischief wrought by this smuggling of the Jesuitical spirit into biology. Escherich points out at length the glaring inconsistencies and the obvious untruths of this “ecclesiastical evolution.” He summarises his criticism in the words : “ If the theory of evolution can really be reconciled with the dogmas of the Church only in the way we find here, Wasmann has clearly proved that any such reconciliation is impossible. Because what Wasmann gives here as the theory of evolution is a thing mutilated beyond recognition and incapable of any vitality.” He tries, like a good Jesuit, to prove that it does not tend to undermine, but to give a firm foundation to, the story of supernatural creation, and that it was really not Lamarck and Darwin, but St. Augustin and St. Thomas of Aquin, who founded the science of evolution. “ God does not interfere directly in the order of Nature when he can act by means of natural causes.” Man alone constitutes a remarkable exception; because “the human soul, being a spiritual entity, cannot be derived from matter even by the Divine omnipotence, like the vital forms of the plants and animals ” (p. 299). In an instructive article on “Jesuitical Science” (in the Frankfort Freie Wort, No. 22, 1904), R. H. Francd gives an interesting list of the prominent Jesuits who are now at work in the various branches of science. As he rightly says, the danger consists “in a systematic introduction of the Jesuitical spirit into science, a persistent perversion of all its problems and solutions, and an astute undermining of its foundations; to speak more precisely, the danger is that people are not sufficiently conscious of it, and that they, and even science itself, fall into the cleverly prepared pit of believing that there is such a thing as Jesuitical science, the results of which may be taken seriously.” 1 1 The eel-like sophistry of the Jesuits, which has been brought to such a wonderful pitch in their political system, cannot, as a rule, be met by argument. An interesting illustration of this was given by Father Wasmann himself in his controversy with the physician, Dr. Julian Marcuse. The “ scientific ” Wasmann had gone so far in his zeal for religion as to support a downright swindle of a “ miraculous cure ” in honour of the “Mother of God of Oostacker ” (the Belgian Lourdes). Dr. Marcuse succeeded in exposing the whole astounding story of this “pious fraud” (Deutsche Stimmen, Berlin, 1903, iv. Jahrg., No. 20). Instead of giving a scientific refutation, the Jesuit replied with sophistic �24 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION While fully recognising these dangers, I nevertheless feel that the Jesuit Father Wasmann, and his colleagues, have— unwittingly—done a very great service to the progress of pure science. The Catholic Church, the most powerful and widespread of the Christian sects, sees itself compelled to capitulate to the idea of evolution. It embraces the most important application of the idea, Lamarck and Darwin’s theory of descent, which it had vigorously combated until twenty years ago. It does, indeed, mutilate the great tree, cutting off its roots and its highest branch; it rejects spon­ taneous generation or archigony at the bottom, and the descent of man from animal ancestors above. But these exceptions will not last. Impartial biology will take no notice of them, and the religious creed will at length determine that the more complex species have been evolved from a series of simpler forms according to Darwinian principles. The belief in a supernatural creation is restricted to the production of the earliest and simplest stem-forms, from which the “natural species ” have taken their origin; Wasmann gives that name to all species that are demonstrably descended from a common stem-form; in other words, to what other classifiers call “ stems ” or “ phyla. ” The 4,000 species of ants in his system, which he believes to be genetically related, are comprised by him in one “natural species.” On the other hand, man forms one isolated “ natural species ” for himself, without any con­ nection with the other mammals. The Jesuitical sophistry that Wasmann betrays in this ingenious distinction between “systematic and natural species ” is also found in his Philosophic “ Thoughts on Evolution” (chap, viii.), his distinction between philosophic and scientific evolution, or between evolution in one stem and in several stems. His remarks (in chap, vii.) on “the cell and spontaneous generation ” are similarly marred by sophistry. The question of spontaneous generation or archi­ gony—that is to say, of the first appearance of organic life on the earth, is one of the most difficult problems in biology, perversion and personal invective (Scientific [?] Supplement to Germania, Berlin, 1902, No. 43, and 1903, No. 13). In his final reply, Dr. Marcuse said : “I have accomplished my object—to let thoughtful people see once fnore the kind of ideas that are found in the world of dead and literal faith, which tries to put the crudest superstition and reverence for the rnyth of miraculous cures in the place of science, truth and knowledge (Deutsche Stimmen, 1903, v. Jahrgang, No. 3). �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 25 one of those in which the most distinguished students betray a striking weakness of judgment. Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, of Jena, has lately written an able and popular little work on that subject. In his Spontaneous Generation and Professor Reinke (1903), he has shown to what absurd consequences the ecclesiastical ideas lead on this very question. The botanist Reinke, of Kiel, is now regarded amongst religious people as the chief opponent of Darwinism; for many con­ servatives this is because he is a member of the Prussian Herrenhaus (a very intelligent body, of course 1). Although he is a strong evangelical, many of his mystic deductions agree surprisingly with the Catholic speculations of Father Wasmann. This is especially the case with regard to spon­ taneous generation. They both declare that the first appear­ ance of life must be traced to a miracle, to the work of a personal deity, whom Reinke calls the “cosmic intelligence.” I have shown the unscientific character of these notions in my last two works, The Riddle of the Universe and The Wonders of Life. I have drawn attention especially to the widely distributed monera of the chromacea class—organisms of the simplest type conceivable, whose whole body is merely an unnucleated green, structureless globule of plasm (Chroococcus); their whole vital activity consists of growth (by forming plasm) and multiplication (by dividing into two). There is little theoretical difficulty in conceiving the origin of these new simple monera from inorganic compounds of albumen, or their later transformation into the simplest nucleated cells. All this, and a good deal more that will not fit in his Jesuitical frame, is shrewdly ignored by Wasmann. In view of the great influence that Catholicism still has on public life in Germany, through the Centre party, this change of front should be a great gain to education. Virchow demanded as late as 1877 that the dangerous doctrine of evolution should be excluded from the schools. The Ministers of Instruction of the two chief German States gratefully adopted this warning from the leader of the pro­ gressive party, forbade the teaching of Darwinian ideas, and made every effort to check the spread of biological knowledge. Now, twenty-five years afterwards, the Jesuits come forward, and demand the opposite. They recognise openly that the hated theory of evolution is established, and try to reconcile it with the creed ! What an irony of history ! And we find much the same story when we read the struggles for freedom �2Ô LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION of thought and for the recognition of evolution in the other educated countries of Europe. In Italy, its cradle and home, educated people generally look upon the papacy with the most profound disdain. I have spent many years in Italy, and have never met an educated Italian of such bigoted and narrow views as we usually find amongst educated German Catholics—represented with success in the Reichstag by the Centre party. It is proof enough of the reactionary character of German Catholics that the Pope himself describes them as his most vigorous soldiers, and points them out as models to the faithful of other nations. As the whole history of the Roman Church shows, the charlatan of the' Vatican is the deadly enemy of free science and free teaching. The present German Emperor ought to regard it as his most sacred duty to maintain the tradition of the Reformation, and to promote the formation of the German people in the sense of Frederick the Great. Instead of this we have to look on with heavy hearts while the Emperor, badly advised and misled by those in influence about him, suffers himself to be caught closer and closer in the net of the Catholic clergy, and sacrifices to it the intelligence of the rising generation. The firmness of the belief in conventional dogmas, which hampers the progress of rational enlightenment in orthodox Protestant circles as well as Catholic, is often admired as an expression of the deep emotion of the German people. But its real source is their confusion of thought and their credu­ lity, the power of conservative tradition, and the reactionary state of political education. While our schools are bent under the yoke of the creeds, those of our neighbours are free. France, the pious daughter of the Church, gives anxious moments to her ambitious mother. She is breaking the chains of the Concordat, and taking up the work of the Reformation. In Germany, the birthplace of the Reforma­ tion, the Reichstag and the Government vie with each other in smoothing the paths for the Jesuits, and fostering, instead of suppressing, the intolerant spirit of the sectarian school. Let us hope that the latest episode in the history of evolution, its recognition by Jesuitical science, will bring about the reverse of what they intend—the substitution of rational science for blind faith. �CHAPTER II ' The Struggle over our Genealogical Tree OUR APE-RELATIVES AND THE VERTEBRATE-STEM In the previous chapter I tried to give you a general idea of the present state of the controversy in regard to evolution. Comparing the various branches of thought we found that the older mythological ideas of the creation of the world were driven long ago out of the province of inorganic science, but that they did not yield to the rational conception of natural development until a much later date in the field of organic nature. Here the idea of evolution did not prove completely victorious until the beginning of the twentieth century, when its most zealous and dangerous opponent, the Church, was forced to admit it. Hence the open acknowledgment of the Jesuit, Father Wasmann, deserves careful attention, and we may look forward to a further development. If his force of conviction and his moral courage are strong enough, he will go on to draw the normal conclusions from his high scientific attainments and leave the Catholic Church, as the prominent Jesuits, Count Hoensbroech and the able geologist, Professor Renard of Ghent, one of the workers on the deep-sea deposits in the Challenger expedition, have lately done. But even if this does not happen, his recognition of Darwinism, in the name of Christian belief, will remain a landmark in the history of evolution. His ingenious and very Jesuitical attempt to bring together the opposite poles will have no very mischievous effect; it will rather tend to hasten the victory of the scientific conception of evolution over the mystic beliefs of the Churches. You will see this more clearly if we go on to consider the 27 �28 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION important special problem of the “descent of man from the ape,” and its irreconcilability with the conventional belief that God made man according to His own image. That this ape or pithecoid theory is an irresistible deduction from the general principle of evolution was clearly recognised fortyfive years ago, when Darwin’s work appeared, by the shrewd and vigilant theologians; it was precisely in this fact that they found their strongest motive for vigorous resistance. It is quite clear. Either man was brought into existence, like the other animals, by a special creative act, as Moses and Linné taught (an “ émbodied idea of the Creator,” as the famous Agassiz put it so late as 1858) ; or he has been developed naturally from a series of mammal ancestors, as is claimed by the systems of Lamarck and Darwin. In view of the very great importance of this pithecoid theory, we will first cast a brief glance at its founders and then summarise the proofs in support of it. The famous French biologist, Jean Lamarck, was the first scientist defin­ itely to affirm the descent of man from the ape and seek to give scientific proof of it. In his splendid work, fifty years in advance of his time, the Philosophie Zoologique (1809), he clearly traced the modifications and advances that must have taken place in the transformation of the man-like apes (the primate forms similar to the orang and the chimpanzee) ; the adaptation to walking upright, the consequent modification of the hands and feet, and later, the formation of speech and the attainment of a higher degree of intelligence. Lamarck’s remarkable theory, and this important consequence of it, soon fell into oblivion. When Darwin brought evolution to the front again fifty years afterwards, he paid no attention to the special conclusion. He was content to make the following brief prophetic observa­ tion in his work “ Light will be thrown on the origin and the history of man.” Even this innocent remark seemed so momentous to the first German translator of the work, Bronn, that he suppressed it. When Darwin was asked by Wallace whether he would not go more fully into it, he replied : “ I think of avoiding the whole subject, as it is so much involved in prejudice ; though I quite admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the thinker.” The first thorough works of importance on the subject ap­ peared in 1863. Thomas Huxley in England, and Carl Vogt in Germany, endeavoured to show that the descent of man �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION from the ape was a necessary consequence of Darwinism, and to provide an empirical base for the theory by every available argument. Huxley’s work on Afcwi 5 Place in Nature was particularly valuable. • He first gave convincingly, in three lectures, the empirical evidence on the subject—the natural history of the anthropoid apes, the anatomical and embryo­ logical relations of man to the next lowest animals, and the recently discovered fossil human remains. I then (1866) made the first attempt to establish the theory of evolution comprehensively by research in anatomy and embryology, and to determine the chief stages in the natural classification of the vertebrates that must have been passed through by our earlier vertebrate ancestors. Anthropology thus becomes a part of zoology. In my History of Creation I further developed these early evolutionary sketches, and improve­ ments were made in the successive editions. In the meantime, the great master, Darwin, had decided to deal with this chief evolutionary problem in a special work. The two volumes of his Descent of Man appeared in 1871. They contained an able discussion of sexual selection, or the selective influence of sexual love and high psychic activities connected therewith, and their significance in regard to the origin of man. As this part of Darwin’s work was after­ wards attacked with particular virulence, I will say that, in my opinion, it is of the greatest importance, not only for the general theory of evolution, but also for psychology, anthro­ pology, and aesthetics. My own feeble early efforts (1866), not only to establish the descent of man from the nearest related apes, but also to determine more precisely the long series of our earlier and lower vertebrate ancestors, had not at all satisfied me. In praticular, I had had to leave unanswered in my General Morphology the very interesting question : from which in­ vertebrate animals the vertebrate stem originally came. A clear and unexpected light was thrown on it some time after­ wards by the astounding discoveries of Kowalevsky, which revealed an essential agreement in embryonic development between the lowest vertebrate (Amphioxus) and a lowly tunicate (Ascidia). In the succeeding years, the numerous discoveries in connection with the formation of the germinal layers in different animals so much enlarged our embryo­ logical outlook that I was able to prove the complete homo­ logy of the two-layered gastrula (a cup-shaped embryonic �30 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION form) in all the tissue-forming- animals (metazoa) in my Monograph on the Sponges. From this I inferred, in virtue of the biogenetic law, the common descent of all the metazoa from one and the same gastrula-shaped stem-form, the gastrcea. This hypothetical stem-form, to which man’s earliest multicellular ancestors also belong, was afterwards proved by Monticelli’s observations to be still in existence. The evolution of these very simple tissue-forming animals from still simpler unicellular forms (protozoa) is shown by the corresponding processes that we witness in what is called the segmentation of the ovum or gastrulation, in the develop­ ment of the two-layered germ from the single cell of the ovum. Encouraged by these great advances of modern phylogeny, and with the support of many new discoveries in comparative anatomy and embryology, in which a number of distinguished observers were at work, I was able in 1874 to venture on the first attempt to trace continuously the whole story of man’s evolution. In doing so, I took my stand on the firm ground of the biogenetic law, seeking to give a phylogenetic cause for each fact of embryology. My Evolution of Man, which made the first attempt to accomplish this difficult task, was materially improved and enlarged as new and important dis­ coveries were made. The latest edition (1903 [1904 in English]) contains thirty chapters distributed in two volumes, the first of which deals with embryology (or onto­ geny), and the second with the development of species (or phylogeny). Though I was quite conscious that there were bound to be gaps and weak points in these first attempts to frame a natural anthropogeny I had hoped they would have some in­ fluence on modern anthropology, and especially that the first sketches of a genealogical tree of the animal world would prove a stimulus to fresh research and improvement. In this I was much mistaken. The dominant school of anthropology, especially in Germany, declined to suffer the introduction of the theory of evolution, declaring it to be an unfounded hypothesis, and described our carefully prepared ancestral trees as mere figments. This was due, in the first place, to the great authority of the founder and president (for many years) of the German Anthropological Society, Rudolf Virchow, as I briefly pointed out in the previous chapter. In view of the great regard that is felt for this distinguished scientist, and the extent to which his powerful opposition pre- �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 31 vented the spread of the theory, it is necessary to deal more fully with his position on the subject. I am still further con­ strained to do this because of the erroneous views of it that are circulating, and my own fifty years’ acquaintance with my eminent teacher enables me to put them right. Not one of Virchow’s numerous pupils and friends can appreciate more than I do his real services to medical science. His Cellular Pathology (1858), his thorough application of the cell-theory to the science of disease, is, in my opinion, one of the greatest advances made by modern medicine. I had the good fortune to begin my medical studies at Würzburg in 1852, and to spend six valuable terms under the personal guidance of four biologists of the first rank—Albert Kölliker, Rudolf Virchow, Franz Leydig and Carl Gegenbaur. The great stimulus that I received from these distinguished masters in every branch of comparative and microscopic biology was the starting-point of my whole training in that science, and enabled me subsequently to follow with ease the higher intellectual flight of Johannes Müller. From Virchow especially I learned, not only the analytic art of careful observation and judicious appreciation of the detailed facts of anatomy, but also the synthetic conception of the whole human frame, the profound conviction of the unity of our nature, the inseparable connection of body and mind, to which Virchow gave a fine expression in his classic essay on “The Efforts to bring about Unity in Scientific Medicine ” (1849). The leading articles which he wrote at that time for the Journal of Pathological Anatomy and Physiology, which he had founded, contain much new insight into the wonders of life, and a number of excellent general reflections on their significance—pregnant ideas that we can make direct use of for Monistic purposes. In the controversy that broke out between empirical rationalism and materialism and the older vitalism and mysticism, he took the side of the former, and fought together with Jacob Moleschott, Carl Vogt, and Ludwig Büchner. I owe the firm conviction of the unity of organic and inorganic nature, of the mechanical character of all vital and psychic activity, which I have always held to be the foundation of my Monistic system, in a great measure to • Virchow’s teaching and the exhaustive conversations I had with him when I was his assistant. The profound views of the nature of the cell and the independent individuality of these elementary organisms, which he advanced in his great �3- LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION work Cellular Pathology, remained guiding principles for me in the prolonged studies that I made thirty years afterwards erf the organisation of the radiolaria and other unicellular protists; and also in regard to the theory of the cell-soul, which followed naturally from the psychological study of it. His life at Wurzburg was the most brilliant period of Virchow’s indefatigable scientific labours. A change took place when he removed to Berlin in 1856. He then occupied himself chiefly with political and social and civic interests. In the last respect he has done so much for Berlin and the welfare of the German people that I need not enlarge on it. Nor will I go into his self-sacrificing and often thankless political work as leader of the progressive party; there are I differences of opinion as to its value. But we must carefully examine his peculiar attitude towards evolution, and especially its chief application, the ape-theory. He was at first favour­ able to it, then sceptical, and finally decidedly hostile. I When the Lamarckian theory was brought to light again ■ by Darwin in 1859, many thought that it was Virchow’s vocation to take the lead in defending it. He had made a thorough study of the problem of heredity; he had realised the power of adaptation through his study of pathological changes; and he had been directed to the great question of the origin of man by his anthropological studies. He was at that time regarded as a determined opponent of all dogmas; he combated transcendentalism either in the form of eccle­ siastical creeds or anthropomorphism. After 1862 he de­ clared that “the possibility of a transition from species to species was a necessity of science.” When I opened the first public discussion of Darwinism at the Stettin Scientific Con­ gress in 1863, Virchow and Alexander Braun were among the few scientists who would admit the subject to be important and deserving of the most careful study. When I sent to him in 1865 two lectures that I had delivered at Jena on the origin and genealogical tree of the human race, he willingly received them amongst his Collection of Popular Scientific Lectures. In the course of many long conversations I had with him on the matter, he agreed with me in the main, though with the prudent reserve and cool scepticism that • characterised him. He adopts the same moderate attitude in the lecture that he delivered to the Artisans’ Union at Berlin in 1869 on “Human and Ape Skulls.” �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 33 His position definitely changed in regard to Darwinism from 1877 onward. At the Scientific Congress that was then held at Munich I had, at the pressing request of my Munich friends, undertaken the first address (on 18th September) on “Modern Evolution in Relation to the whole of Science.” In this address I had substantially advanced the same general views that I afterwards enlarged in my Monism, Riddle of the Universe, and Wonders of Life. In the ultramontane • capital of Bavaria, in sight of a great university which em­ phatically describes itself as Catholic, it was somewhat bold to make such a confession of faith. The deep impression that it had made was indicated by the lively manifestations of assent on the one hand, and displeasure on the other, that were at once made in the Congress itself and in the Press. On the following day I departed for Italy (according to an arrangement made long before). Virchow did not come to Munich until two days afterwards, when he delivered (on 22nd September, in response to entreaties from people of position and influence) his famous antagonistic speech on “The Freedom of Science in the Modern State.” The gist of the speech was that this freedom ought to be restricted; that evolution is an unproved hypothesis, and ought not to be taught in the school because it is dangerous to the State: “We must not teach,” he said, “that man descends from the ♦ ape or any other animal.” In 1849, the young Monist, Virchow, had emphatically declared this conviction, “that he would never be induced to deny the thesis of the unity of human nature and its consequences ” ; now, . twenty-eight years afterwards, the prudent Dualistic politician entirely denied it. He had formerly taught that all the bodily and mental processes in the human organism depend on the mechanism of the cell-life; now he declared the soul to be a special immaterial entity. But the crowning feature of this reactionary speech was his compromise with the Church, which he had fought so vigorously twenty years before. The character of Virchow’s speech at Munich is best seen in the delight with which it was at once received by the reactionary and clerical papers, and the profound concern of all Liberal journals, either in the political or the religious sense. When Darwin read the English translation of the speech he—generally so gentle in his judgments—wrote: “Virchow’s conduct is shameful, and I hope he will some day feel the shame.” In 1878, I made a full reply to it in my > �34 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION Free Science and Free Teaching, in which I collected the most important press opinions on the matter.1 From this very decided turn at Munich until‘his death twenty-five years afterwards, Virchow was an indefatigable and very influential opponent of evolution. In his annual appearances at congresses he has always contested it, and has obstinately clung to his statement that “it is quite cer­ tain that man does not descend from the ape or any other animal.” To the question : “Whence does he come, then? ” he had no answer, and retired to the resigned position of the Agnostic, which was common before Darwin’s time: “We do not know how life arose, and how the various species came into the world.” His son-in-law, Professor Rabi, has tried to draw attention once more to his earlier conception, and has declared that even in later years Virchow often recognised the truth of evolution in private conversation. This only makes it the more regrettable that he always said the con­ trary in public. The fact remains that ever since the oppo-' nents of evolution, especially the reactionaries and clericals have appealed to the authority of Virchow. ’ The wholly reactionary system that this led to has been well described by Robert Drill, (1902) in his Virchow as a Reac­ tionary. How little qualified the great pathologist was to appreciate the scientific bases of the pithecoid theory is clear from the absurd statement he made, in the opening speech of the Vienna Congress of Anthropologists, in 1894, that man might just as well be claimed to descend from a sheep or an elephant as from an ape. Any competent zoologist can see from this the little knowledge Virchow had of systematic zoology and comparative anatomy. However, he retained his authority as president of the German Anthropological Society, which remained impervious to Darwinian ideas. Even such, vigorous controversialists as Carl Vogt, and such scientific partisans of the ape-man of Neanderthal as Schaafhausen, could make no impression. Virchow’s authority was equally great for twenty years in the Berlin Press, both Liberal and Conservative. The Kreutzzeitung and the Ewangelische Kirchenzeitung were delighted that • . The manuscript letter in which the gentle Darwin expresses so severe a judgment on Virchow is printed in my Cambridge lecture, The Last Link. My answer to Virchow’s speech is contained in the second volume of my Popular Lectures, and has latelv appeared in the Freie Wort (April, 1905). �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 35 “the learned progressist was conservative in the best sense of the word as regards evolution.” The ultramontane Ger­ mania rejoiced that the powerful representative of pure science had, “with a few strokes of his cudgel, reduced to impo­ tence ” the absurd ape-theory and its chief protagonist, Ernst Haeckel. The National-Zeitung could not sufficiently thank the free-thinking, popular leader for having lifted from us for ever the oppressive mountain of the theory of simian descent. The editor of the Volks-Zeitung, Bernstein, who has done so much for the spread of knowledge in his excellent popular manuals of science, obstinately refused to admit articles that ventured to support the erroneous ape-theory “refuted by Virchow. It would take up too much space to attempt to give even a general survey of the remarkable and enormous literature of the subject that has accumulated in the last three decades in the shape of thousands of learned treatises and popular articles. The greater part of these works have been written under the influence of conventional religious prejudice, and without the necessary acquaintance with the subject, that can only be obtained by a thorough training in biology. The most curious feature of them is that most of the. authors restrict their genealogical interests to the most manlike apes, and do not deal with their origin, or with the deeper roots of our common ancestral tree. They do not see the wood for the trees. Yet it is far easier and safer to penetrate the great mysteries of our animal origin, if we look at the subject from the higher standpoint of vertebrate phylogeny and go deeper into the earlier records of the evolutionary history of the vertebrates. ... Since the great Lamarck established the idea of the verte­ brate at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1801), and his Parisian colleague, Cuvier, shortly afterwards recognised the vertebrates as one of his four chief animal groups, the natural unity of this advanced section of the animal world has not been contested. In all the vertebrates, from the lowest fishes and amphibians up to the apes and man,_ we have the same type of structure, the same characteristic disposition and relations of the chief organs; and they differ materially from the corresponding features in all other animals. The mysterious affinities of the vertebrates induced Goethe, 140 years ago, long before Cuvier, to make prolonged and labori­ ous studies in their comparative anatomy at Jena and �36 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION ' Weimar. Just as he had, in his Metamorphosis of Plants established the unity of organisation by means of the leaf as the common primitive organ, he, in the metamorphosis of the vertebrates, found this common eleipent in the vertebral theory of the skull. And when Cuvier established compara­ tive anatomy as an independent science, this branch of biology was developed to such an extent by the classic re­ search of Johannes Müller, Carl Gegenbaur, Richard Owen, Thomas Huxley, and many other morphologists, that Dar­ winism found its most powerful weapons in this arsenal. The striking differences of external form and internal structure that we find in the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, are due to adaptation to the various uses of their organs and their environments. On the other hand, the 4 astonishing agreement in their typical character, that persists gj in spite of their differences, is due to inheritance from 4 common ancestors. The evidence thus afforded by comparative anatomy is so cogent that anyone who goes impartially and attentively through a collection of skeletons can convince himself at once of the morphological unity of the vertebrate stem. The evolutionary evidence of comparative ontogeny, or embryor , *s fess easy to grasp and less accessible, but not less important. It came to light at a much later date, and its extreme value was only made clear, by means of the biogenetic law, some forty years ago. It shows that every verte­ brate, like every other animal, develops from a single cell, but that the course of its embryonic development is peculiar, and characterised by embryonic forms that are not found in the invertebrates. We find in them especially the chordula, or chorda-larva, a very simple worm-shaped embryonic form, without limbs, head, or higher sense-organs; the body con­ sists merely of six very simple primitive organs. From these are developed steadily the hundreds of different bones, muscles, and other organs that we afterwards distinguish in the mature vertebrate. The remarkable and very complex course of this embryonic development is essentially the same in man and the ape, and in the amphibians and fishes. We see in it, in accordance with the biogenetic law, a new and important witness to the common descent of all vertebrates from a single primitive form, the chordcea. But, important as these arguments of comparative embryo­ logy are, one needs many years’ study in the unfamiliar and �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 37 difficult province of embryology before one can realise their evolutionary force. There are, in fact, not a few embryo­ logists (especially of the modern school of experimental em­ bryology) who do not succeed in doing so. It is otherwise with the palpable proofs that we take from a remote science, paleontology. The remarkable fossil remains and impressions of extinct animals and plants give us directly the historical evidence we need to understand the successive appearance and disappearance of the various species and groups. Geology has firmly established the chronological order of the sedimentary rocks, which have been successively formed of mud at the floor of the ocean, and has deduced their age from the thickness of the strata, and determined the relative date of their formation. The vast period during which organic life has been developing on the earth runs to many million years. The number is variously estimated at less than a hundred or at several hundred million years. If we take the smaller number of 200 million years, we find them distributed amongst the five chief periods of the earth’s organic develop­ ment in such a way that the earlier or archeozoic period absorbs nearly one half. As the sedimentary rocks of this period, chiefly gneisses and crystalline schists, are in a meta­ morphosed condition, the fossil remains in them are unrecog­ nisable. In the next succeeding strata of the paleozoic period we find the earliest remains of fossilised vertebrates, Silurian primitive fishes (selachii) and ganoids. These are followed, in the Devonian system, by the first dipneust fishes (a transi­ tional form from the fishes to the amphibia). In the next, the Carboniferous system, we find the first terrestrial or fourfooted vertebrates—amphibians of the order of the stegocephala. A little later, in the Permian rocks, the earliest amniotes, lowly, lizard-like reptiles (tocosauria), make their ap­ pearance ; the warm-blooded birds and mammals are still wanting. We have the first traces of the mammals in the Triassic, the earliest sedimentary rocks of the mesozoic age; these are of the monotreme sub-class (pantotheria and allotheria). They are succeeded by the first marsupials (prodidelphia) in the Jurassic, the ancestral forms of the placentals (mallotheria), in the Cretaceous. But the richest development of’ the mammal class takes place in the next or Tertiary age. In the course of its four periods—the eocene, oligocene, miocene, and pliocene—the mammal species increase steadily in number, variety, and �3s last words on evolution complexity, down tq? the present time. From the lowest common ancestral group of the placentals proceed four djvergent branches, the legions of the carnassia, rodents, th? rlTS’ Tanl-Pr^at?’i The Primate le£ion surpasses all the rest. In this Linné long ago included the lemurs, apes and man. The historical order in which the various staged of vertebrate development make their successive appearance corresponds entirely . to the morphological order of their advance in organisation, as we have learned it from the study of comparative anatomy and embryology. These paleontological facts are among the most important proofs of the descent of man from a long series of higher and lower vertebrates. There is no other explanation possible except evolution or the chronological succession of these classes, which is in perfect harmony with, the morphological and systematic distribution. The anti-èvolutionists have not even attempted to give any other explanation. The fishes dipneusts, amphibians, reptiles, monotremes, marsupials-’ placentals lemurs, apes, anthropoid apes, and ape-men (pithecanthropi), are inseparable links of a long ancestral chain, of which the last and most perfect link is man. One of the paleontological facts I have quoted, namely, the late appearance of the mammal class in geology—is particu­ larly important. This most advanced group of the verte­ brates comes on the stage in the Triassic period, in the second and shorter half of the organic history of the earth. It is represented only by low and small forms in the whole of the mesozoic age, during the domination of the reptiles. Throughout this long period, which is estimated by some geologists at 8-11, by others at 20 or more, million years, the.dominant reptile class developed its many remarkable and curious forms; there were swimming marine reptiles (halisauria), flying reptiles (pterosauria), and colossal land reptiles (dinosauria). It was much later, in the Tertiary period, that the mammal class attained the wealth of larg and advanced e * placental forms that secured its predominance over this more recent period. The many and thorough investigations made during the last few decades into the ancestral history of the mammals have convinced all zoologists who were engaged in them that they may be traced to a common root. All the mammals, from the lowest monotremes and marsupials to the ape and man, have a large number of striking characteristics in common, �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 39 and these distinguish them from all oMer vertebrates : the hair and glands of the skin, the feeding of the young with the mother’s milk, the peculiar formation of the lower jaw and the ear-bones connected therewith, and other features in the structure of the skull; also, the possession of a knee-cap (patelhW and the loss of the nucleus m the red blood-cells, further, the complete diaphragm, which entirely separates the pectoral cavity from the abdominal, is only found m the mammals; in all the other vertebrates there is still an open communication between the two cavities. The monophyletic (or single) origin of the whole mammalian class is therefore ’now regarded by all competent experts as an established fact. In the face of this important fact, what is called the ape­ question ” loses a good deal of the importance that was for­ merly ascribed to it. All the momentous consequences that follow from it in regard to our human nature, our past and future, and our bodily and psychic life, remain undisturbed whether we derive man directly from one of the primates, an ape or lemur, or from some other branch, some unknown lower form, of the mammalian stem. It is important to point this out, because certain dangerous attempts have been made lately by Jesuitical zoologists and zoological Jesuits to cause fresh confusion on the matter. In a richly illustrated and widely read work that Hans Kraemer published a few years ago, under the title, The Universe and Man, an able and learned anthropologist, Pro­ fessor Klaatsch of Heidelberg, deals with the origin and development of the human race,” and admirably describes the primitive history of man and his civilisation. However, he denounces the idea of man’s descent from the ape as “ irrational, narrow-minded, and false ”; he grounds this severe censure on the fact that none of the living apes can be the ancestor of humanity. But no competent scientist had ever said anything so foolish. If we look closer inti) this fight with windmills, we find that Klaatsch holds substantially the same view of the pithecoid theory as I have done since 1866. He says expressly : “The three anthropoid apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang, seem to diverge from a com­ mon root, which was near to that of the gibbon and man.” I had long ago given the name of archiprimas to this single hypothetical root-form of the primates, which he calls the “primatoid.” It lived in the earliest part of the Tertiary period, and had probably been developed in the Cretaceous �4° LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION from older mammals. The very forced and unnatural hypo­ thesis by means of which Klaatsch goes pn to make the primates depart very widely from the other mammals seems to me to be quite untenable, like the similar hypothesis that Alsberg, Wilser, and other anthropologists who deny our pithecoid descent, have lately advanced. All these attempts have a common object—to save’s man’s privileged position in Nature, to widen as much as possible the gulf between him and the rest of the mammals, and to . conceal his real origin. It is the familiar tendency of the ■parvenu, which we so often notice in the aristocratic sons of energetic men who have won a high position by their own ’ exertions. This sort of vanity is acceptable enough to the ruling powers and the Churches, because it tends to support their own fossilised pretensions to a “Divine image ” in man and a special “ Divine grace ” in princes. The zoologist or anthropologist who studies our genealogy in a strictly scien­ tific spirit takes no more notice of these tendencies than of thè Almanack de Gotha. He seeks to discover the naked truth, as /t ls yielded by the great results of modern science, in which there is no longer any doubt that man is really a de­ scendant of the ape that is to say, of a long extinct anthro­ poid ape. As has been pointed out over and over again by distinguished supporters of this opinion, the proofs of it are exceptionally clear and simple—much clearer and simpler than they are in regard to many other mammals. Thus, for instance, the origin of the elephants, the armadilloes, the sirena, or the whales, is a much more difficult problem than the origin of man. When Huxley published his powerful essay on “Man’s Place in Nature ” in 1863, he gave it a frontispiece showing the skeletons of man and the four living anthropoid apes, the Asiatic orang and gibbon, and the African chimpanzee and gorilla. . Plate II. in the first edition of this work differs from this in giving two young specimens of the orang and the chim­ panzee, and raising their size to correspond with the other three skeletons. Candid comparison of these five skeletons shows that {hey. are not only very like each other generally, but are identical in the structure, arrangement, and connection of all the parts. The same 200 bones compose the skeleton in man and in the four tailless anthropoid apes, our nearest relatives. The same 300 muscles serve to move the various parts of the skeleton. The same hair covers the skin; the same mam- �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 4P mary glands provide food for the young. The same fourchambered heart acts as central pump of the circulation; the same 32 teeth are found in our jaws; the same reproductive organs maintain the species; the same groups of neurona or ganglionic cells compose the wondrous structure of the brain, and accomplish that highest function of the plasm which we call the soul, and many still believe to be an immortal entity. Huxley has thoroughly established this profound truth, and by further comparison with the lower apes and lemurs he came to formulate his important pithecometra principle : Whatever organ we take, the differences between man and the anthro­ poid apes are slighter than the corresponding differences between the latter and the lower apes.” If we make a super­ ficial comparison of our skeletons of the anthropomorpha, we certainly notice a few salient differences in the size of the various parts; but these are purely quantitative, and are due to differences in growth, which in turn are caused by adapta­ tion to different environments. There are, as is well known, similar differences between human beings; their arms are sometimes long, sometimes short; the forehead may be high or low, the hair thick or thin, and so on. These anatomic proofs of the pithecoid theory are most happily supplemented and confirmed by certain recent brilliant discoveries in physiology. Chief amongst these are the famous experiments of Dr. Hans Friedenthal at Berlin. He showed that the human blood acts poisonously on and decom­ poses the blood of the lower apes and other mammals, but has not that effect on the blood of the anthropoid apes.1 From previous transfusion experiments it had been learned that the affinity of mammals is connected to a certain extent with their chemical blood-relationship. If the living blood of two nearly related animals of the same family, such as the dog and the fox, or the rabbit and the hare, is mixed together, the living blood-cells of each species remain uninfluenced. But if we mix the blood of the dog and the rabbit, or the fox and the hare, a struggle for life immediately takes place between the two kinds of blood-cells. The watery fluid of serum destroys the blood-cells of the rodent, and m’ce-'nersd.. It is the same with specimens of the blood of the various primates. The blood of the lower apes and lemurs, which are. close to the common root of the primate stem, has a destructive effect 1 See account of similar experiments in the Lancet, 18th January, 1902. [Trans.] �’42 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION on the blooiof the anthropoid apes and man, and mce On the other hand, the human blood has no injurious effect when it is mixed with that of the anthropoid apes. In recent years these interesting experiments have been continued by other physiologists and physicians, such as Pro­ fessor Uhienhuth at Greifswald and Nuttall at London, and they have proved directly the blood-relationship of various mammals. Nuttall studied them carefully in 900 different kinds of blood, which he tested by 16,000 reactions. He the £r£“Jati°n of affinity to the lowest apes of the New World ; and Uhienhuth continued as far as the lemurs. By these results the affinity of man and the anthropoid apes, long established by anatomy, has now been proved physiologically to be in real “blood-relationship. ”1 * ? Not less important are the embryological discoveries of the deceased zoologist, Emil Selenka. He made two long journeys to the East Indies, in order to study on the spot the embryology, of the Asiatic anthropoid apes the orang and gibbon. By means of a number of embryos that he collected he showed that certain remarkable peculiarities in the formation of the placenta, that had up to that time been considered as exclusively human and regarded as a special distinction of our species, were found in just the same way in the closely related anthropoid apes, though not in the rest of the apes. On the ground of these and other facts, I maintain that the descent of man from extinct Tertiary anthropoid apes is proved just as plainly as• the descent of birds from reptiles, or the descent of reptiles from amphibians, which no zoologist hesitates to admit toThe relationship is as close as was claimed by my former fellow-student, the Berlin anatomist, Robert Hartmann (with whom I sat at the feet of Johannes Müller fifty years ago), in his admirable work on the anthropoid apes (1883). He proposed to divide the order of primates into two families the primarii (man and the anthropoid apes), and simians (thè real apes, the catarrhine or eastern, and the platyrrhine or western apes). Since? the Dutch physician, Eugen Dubois, discovered the ' famous remains of the fossil ape-man (pithecanthropus 1 Wasmann meets these convincing experiments with mere Jesuitical sophistry. Of the same character is his attack on my Evolution of Man an„,°n the instructive work of Robert Wiedersheim, Man’s Structure as <a Witness to his Past. �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 43 erectus) eleven years ago in Java, and thus brought to light “the missing link,” a large number of works have been pub­ lished on this very interesting group of the primates. In this connection we may particularly note the demonstration by the Strassburg anatomist, Gustav Schwalbe, that the previously discovered Neanderthal skull belongs to an extinct species of man, which was midway between the pithecanthropus and the true human being—the homo primigenus. After a very careful examination, Schwalbe at the same time refuted all the biassed objections that Virchow had made to these and other fossil discoveries, trying to represent them as patho­ logical abnormalities. In all the important relics of fossil men that prove our descent from anthropoid apes Virchow saw pathological modifications, due to unsound habits, gout, rickets, or other diseases of the dwellers in the diluvial caves. He tried in every way to impair the force of the arguments for our primate affinity. So in the controversy over the pithe­ canthropus he raised the most improbable conjectures, merely for the purpose of destroying its significance as a real link between the anthropoid apes and man. Even now, in the controversy over this important ape­ question, amateurs and biassed anthropologists often repeat the false statement that the gap between man and the anthro­ poid ape is not yet filled up and the “ missing link ” not yet discovered. This is a most perverse statement, and can only arise either from ignorance of the anatomical, embryological, and paleontological facts, or incompetence to interpret them aright. As a fact, the morphological chain that stretches from the lemurs to the earlier western apes, from these to the eastern tailed apes, and to the tailless anthropoid apes, and from these direct to man, is now uninterrupted and clear. It would be more plausible to speak of missing links between the earliest lemurs and their marsupial ancestors, or between the latter and their monotreme ancestors. But even these gaps are unimportant, because comparative anatomy and embryo­ logy, with the support of paleontology, have dissipated all doubt as to the unity of the mammalian stem. It is ridiculous to expect paleontology to furnish an unbroken series of positive data, when we remember how scanty and imperfect its material is. I cannot go further here into the interesting recent research in regard to special aspects of our simian descent; nor would it greatly advance our object, because all the general con- �44 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION elusions as to man’s primate descent remain intact, which­ ever way we construct hypothetically the special lines of simian evolution. On the other hand, it is interesting- for us to see how the most recent form of Darwinism, so happily described by Escherich as “ecclesiastical evolution,” stands in regard to these great questions. What does its astutest representative, Father Erich Wasmann, say about them? The tenth chapter of his work, in which he deals at length with ‘the application of the theory of evolution to man,” is a masterpiece of Jesuitical science, calculated to throw the clearest truths into such confusion and so to misrepresent all discoveries as to prevent any reader from forming a clear idea of them. When we compare this tenth chapter with the ninth, in which Wasmann represents the theory of evolution as an irresistible truth on the strength of his own able studies, we can hardly believe that they both came from the same pen— or, rather, we can only understand when we recollect the rule of the Jesuit Congregation : “The end justifies the means.” Untruth is permitted and meritorious in the service of God and his Church. The Jesuitical sophistry that Wasmann employs in order to save man’s unique position in Nature, and to prove that he was immediately created by God, culminates in the antithesis of his two natures. The “ purely zoological conception of man,” which has been established beyond question by the anatomical and embryological comparison with the ape, is said to fail because it does not take into account the chief feature, his “mental life.” It is “psychology that is best fitted to deal with the nature and origin of man.” All the facts of anatomy and embryology that I have gathered to­ gether in my Evolution of Man in proof of the series of his ancestors are either ignored or misconstrued and made ridicu­ lous by Wasmann. The same is done with the instructive facts of anthropology, especially the rudimentary organs, which Robert. Wiederscheim has quoted in his Man’s Struc­ ture as a Witness to his Past. It is clear that the Jesuit writer lacks competence in this department; that he has only a superficial and inadequate acquaintance with comparative anatomy and embryology. If Wasmann had studied the morphology and physiology of the mammals as thoroughly as those of the ants, he would have concluded, if he were impartial, that it is just as necessary to admit a monophyletic (or single) origin for the former as for the latter. If, in �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 45 Wasmann’s opinion, the 4,000 species of ants form a single “ natural system ”—that is to say, descend from one original species—it is just as necessary to admit the same hypothesis for the 6,000 (2,400 living and 3,600 fossil) species of mammals, including the human species. The severe strictures that I have passed on the sophisms and trickery of this “ ecclesiastical evolution ” are not directed against the person and the character of Father Wasmann, but the Jesuitical system which he represents. I do not doubt that this able naturalist (who is personally unknown to me) has written his book in good faith, and has an honourable ambition to reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions between natural evolution and the story of supernatural creation. But this reconciliation of reason and superstition is only possible at the price of a sacrifice of the reason itself. We find this in the case of all the other Jesuits—Fathers Cathrein, Braun, y Besmer, Cornet, Linsmeier, and Muckermann—whose am­ biguous “Jesuitical science” is aptly dealt with in the article of R. H. France that I mentioned before (No. 22 of the Freie Wort, 16th February, 1904, Frankfort). This interesting attempt of Father Wasmann’s does not . stand alone. Signs are multiplying that the Church militant is about to enter on a systematic campaign. I heard from Vienna on the 17th of February, that on the previous day (which happened to be my birthday), a Jesuit, Father Giese, had, in a well-received address, admitted not only evolution in general, but even its application to man, and declared it to be reconcilable with Catholic dogmas—and this at a crowded meeting of “catechists”! It is important to note that in a new Catholic cyclopaedia, Benziger’s Library of Science, the first three volumes (issued at Einsiedeln and Cologne, 1904) deal very fully and ably with the chief problems of evolution : the first with the formation of the earth, the second with spontaneous generation, the third with the theory of descent. The author- of them, Father M. Gander, makes most remarkable concessions to our theory, and endeavours to show that they are not inconsistent with the Bible or the dogmatic treatises of the chief fathers and schoolmen. But, though there is a profuse expenditure of sophistical logic in these Jesuitical efforts, Gander will hardly succeed in mis­ leading thoughtful people. One of his characteristic positions is that spontaneous generation (as the development of organ­ ised living things by purely material processes) is inconceiv­ �46 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION able, but that it might be made possible “ by a special Divine arrangement.” In regard to the descent of man from other animals (which he grants), he makes the reserve that the soul must in any case have been produced by a special creative act. It would be useless to go through the innumerable fallacies and untruths of these modern Jesuits in detail, and point out the rational and scientific'reply. The vast power of this most dangerous religious congregation consists precisely in its device of accepting one part of science in order to destroy the other part more effectively with it. Their masterly act of sophistry, their equivocal “ probabilism,” their mendacious “reservado mentalis,” the principle that the higher aim sancti­ fies the worst means, the pernicious casuistry of Liguori and Gury, the cynicism with which they turn the holiest principles to the gratification of their ambition, have impressed on the Jesuits that black character that Carl Hoensbroech has so well exposed recently. The great dangers that menace real science, owing to this smuggling into it of the Jesuitical spirit, must not be undervalued. They have been well pointed out by Francé, Escherich, and others. They are all the greater in Germany at the present time, as the Government and the Reichstag are working together to prepare the way for the Jesuits, and to yield a most pernicious influence on the school to these deadly enemies of the free spirit of the country. However, we will hope that this clerical reaction represents only a passing episode in modern history. We trust that one permanent result of it will be the recognition, in principle, even by the Jesuits, of the great idea of evolution. We may then rest assured that its most important consequence, the descent of man from other primate forms, will press on victoriously, and soon be recognised as a beneficent and helpful truth. �CHAPTER III The Controversy over the Soul. THE IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY AND GOD Though it was my original intention to deliver only two lectures, I have been moved by several reasons to add a supplementary one. In the first place, I notice with regret that I have been compelled by pressure of time to leave un­ touched in my earlier lectures, or to treat very inadequately, several important points in my theme; there is, in particular, the very important question of the nature of the soul. In the second place, I have been convinced by the many contradictory press-notices during the last few days that many of my in­ complete observations have been misunderstood or misinter­ preted. And, thirdly, it seemed advisable to give a brief and clear summary of the whole subject in this farewell lecture, to take a short survey of the past, present, and future of the theory of evolution, and especially its relation to the three great questions of personal immortality, the freedom of the will, and the personality of God. I must claim the reader’s patience and indulgence even to a greater extent than in the previous chapters, as the subject is one of the most difficult and obscure that the human mind approaches. I have dealt at length in my recent works, The Riddle of the Universe and The Wonders of Life, with the controversial questions of biology that I treat cursorily here. But I would like to put before you now, in a general survey, the powerful arguments that modern science employs against the prevailing superstition in regard to evolution, and to show that the Monistic system throws a clear light on the great questions of God and the world, the soul and life. In the previous chapters I have tried to give a general idea • 47 �48 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION of the present state of the theory of evolution and its victorious struggle with the older legend of creation. We have seen that even the most advanced organism, man, was not brought into being by a creative act, but gradually developed from a long series of mammal ancestors. We also saw that the most man-like mammals, the anthropoid apes, have substantially the same structure as man, and that the evolution of the latter from the former can now be regarded as a fully estab­ lished hypothesis, or, rather, an historical fact. But in this study we had in view mainly the structure of the body and its various organs. We touched very briefly on the evolution of the human mind, or the immaterial soul that dwells in the body for a time, according to a venerable tradition. To-day we turn chiefly to the development of the soul, and consider whether man’s mental development is controlled by the same natural laws as that of his body, and whether it also is inseparably bound up with that of the rest of the mammals. At the very threshold of this difficult province we encounter the curious fact that there are two radically distinct tendencies in psychology at our universities to-day. On one side we have the metaphysical and professional psychologists. They still cling to the older view that man’s soul is a special entity, a unique independent individuality, which dwells for a time only in the mortal frame, leaving it and living on as an immortal spirit after death. This dualistic theory is connected with the doctrine of most religions, and owes its high authority to the fact that it is associated with the most important ethical, social, and practical interests. Plato gave prominence to the idea of the immortality of the soul in philosophy long ago. Descartes at a later date gave emphasis to it by ascribing a true soul to man alone and refusing it to the animals. This metaphysical psychology, which ruled alone for a considerable period, began to be opposed in the eighteenth, and still more in the nineteenth, century by comparative psychology. An impartial comparison of the psychic processes in the higher and lower animals proved that there were numer­ ous transitions and gradations. A long series of intermediate stages connects the psychic life of the higher animals with that of man on the one side, and that of the lower animals on the other. There was no such thing as a sharp dividing line, as Descartes supposed. But the greatest blow was dealt at the predominant meta­ �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 49 physical conception of the life of the soul thirty years ago by the new methods of psychophysics. By means of a series of able experiments the physiologists, Theodor Fechner and Ernst Heinrich Weber, of Leipsic, showed that an important part of the mental activity can be measured and expressed in mathematical formulae just as well as other physiological pro­ cesses, such as muscular contractions. Thus the laws of physics control a part of the life of the soul just as absolutely as they do the phenomena of inorganic nature. It is true that psychophysics has only partially realised the very high ex­ pectations that were entertained in regard to its Monistic significance; but the fact remains that a part of the mental life is just as unconditionally ruled by physical laws as any other natural phenomena. Thus physiological psychology was raised by psychophysics to the rank of a physical and, in principle, exact science. But it had already obtained solid foundations in other provinces of biology. Comparative psychology had traced connectedly the long gradation from man to the higher animals, from these to the lower, and so on down to the very lowest. At the lowest stage it found those remarkable beings, invisible with the naked eye, that were discovered in stagnant water every­ where after the invention of the microscope (in the second half of the seventeenth century) and called “infusoria.” They were first accurately described and classified by Gottfried Ehrenberg, the famous Berlin microscopist. In 1838 he published a large and beautiful work, illustrating on 64 folio pages the whole realm of microscopic life; and this is still the base of all studies of the protists. Ehrenberg was a very ardent and imaginative observer, and succeeded in com­ municating his zeal for the study of microscopic organisms to his pupils. I still recall with pleasure the stimulating ex­ cursions that I made fifty years ago (in the summer of 1854) with my teacher, Ehrenberg, and a few other pupils— including my student-friend, Ferdinand von Richthofen, the famous geographer—to the Zoological Gardens at Berlin. Equipped with fine nets and small glasses, we fished in the ponds of the Zoological Gardens and in the Spree, and caught thousands of invisible micro-organisms, which then richly rewarded our curiosity by the beautiful forms and mysterious movements they disclosed under the microscope. The way in which Ehrenberg explained to us the structure and the vital movements of his infusoria was very curious. �50 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION Misled by the'comparison of the real infusoria with the micro-scopic but highly organised rotifers, he had formed the idea that all animals are alike advanced in organisation, and had indicated this erroneous theory in the very title of his work : The Infusoria as Perfect Organisms: a Glance at the Deeper Life of Organic Nature. He thought he could detect in the simplest infusoria the same distinct organs as in the higher animals—stomach, heart, ovaries, kidneys, muscles, and nerves—and he interpreted their psychic life on the same peculiar principle of equally advanced organisation. Ehrenberg’s theory of life was entirely wrong, and was radically destroyed in the hour of its birth (1838) by the cell­ theory which was then formulated, and to which he never became reconciled. Once Matthias Schleiden had shown the composition of all the plants, tissues, and organs from micro­ scopic cells, the last structural elements of the living organ­ ism, and Theodor Schwann had done the same for the animal .body, the theory attained such an importance that Kolliker and Leydig based on it the modern science of tissues, or his­ tology, and Virchow constructed his cellular pathology by applying it to diseased human beings. These are the most important advances of theoretical medicine. But it was still a long time before the difficult question of the relation of these microscopic beings to the cell was answered. Carl Theodor von Siebold had already maintained (in 1845) that) the real infusoria and the closely related rhizopods were unicellular organisms, and had distinguished these protozoa from the rest of the animals. At the same time, Carl Naegeli had de­ scribed the lowest algae as “unicellular plants.” But this important conception was not generally admitted until some time afterwards, especially after I brought all the unicellular organisms under the head of “protists” (1872), and defined their psychic functions as the “cell-soul.” I was led to make a very close study of these unicellular protists and their primtive cell-soul through my research on the radiolaria, a very remarkable class of microscopic organ­ isms that float in the sea. I was engaged most of my time for more than thirty of the best years of my life (1856-87) in studying them in every aspect, and if I came eventually to adopt a strictly Monistic attitude on all the great questions of biology, I owe it for the most part to my innumerable ob­ servations and uninterrupted reflections on the wonderful vita! movements that are disclosed by these smallest and frailest, . �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 51 and at the same time most beautiful and varied, of living things. I had undertaken the study of the radiolaria as a kind of souvenir of my great master, Johannes Muller. He had loved | to study these animals (of which only a few species were discovered for the first time in the year of my birth, 1834) in the last years of his life, and had in 1855 set up the special group of the rhizopods (protozoa). His last work, which appeared shortly after his death (1858), and contained a description of 50 species of radiolaria, went with me to the I Mediterranean when I made my first long voyage in the summer of 1859. I was so fortunate as to discover about 150 new species of radiolaria at Messina, and based on these my first monograph of this very instructive class of protists (1862). I had no suspicion at that time that fifteen years afterwards the deep-sea finds of the famous Challenger expedition would bring to light an incalculable wealth of these remarkable animals. In my second monograph on them (1887), I was able to describe more than 4,000 different species of radiolaria, and illustrate most of them on 140 plates. I have given a selection of the prettiest forms on ten plates of If- my Art-forms in Nature. I have not space here to go into the forms and vital movei ments of the radiolaria, of the general import of which my t friend, Wilhelm Bolsche, has given a very attractive account ! in his various popular works. I must restrict myself to pointing out the general phenomena that bear upon our | particular subject, the question of the mind. The pretty ; flinty skeletons of the radiolaria, which enclose and protect I the soft unicellular body, are remarkable, not only for their I extraordinary gracefulness and beauty, but also for the geo­ metrical regularity and relative constancy of their forms. The ■ '4,000 species of radiolaria are just as constant as the 4,000 [’■ known species of ants; and, as the Darwinian Jesuit, Father I Wasmann, has convinced himself that the latter have all | descended by transformation from a common stem-form, I s have concluded on the same principles that the 4,000 species ■ of radiolaria have developed from a primitive form in virtue ■ of adaptation and heredity. This primitive form, the stem[ radiolarian (Actissa) is a simple round cell, the soft living protoplasmic body of which is divided into two different parts, an inner central capsule (in the middle of which is the solid ■ round nucleus) and an outer gelatinous envelope (calymma). �52 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION From the outer surface of the latter hundreds and thousands of fine plasmic threads radiate; these are mobile and sensitive processes of the living internal substance, the plasm (or proto­ plasm). 1 hese delicate microscopic threads, or pseudopodia, are the curious organs that effect the sensations (of touch), the locomotion (by pushing), and the orderly construction of the flinty house; at the same time, they maintain the nourishment of the unicellular body, by seizing infusoria, diatoms, and other protists, and drawing them within the plasmic body, where they are digested and assimilated. The radiolaria generally reproduce by the formation of spores. The nucleus within the protoplasmic globule divides into two small nuclei, each of which surrounds itself with a quantity of plasm, and forms a new cell. What is this plasm ? What is this mysterious “ living sub­ stance ” that we find everywhere as the material foundation of the “ wonders of life ” ? Plasm, or protoplasm, is, as Huxley rightly said thirty years ago, “the physical basis of organic life ”; to speak more precisely, it is a chemical compound of carbon that alone accomplishes the various processes of life. In its simplest form the living cell is merely a soft globule of plasm, containing a firmer nucleus. The inner nuclear matter (called caryoplasm) differs somewhat in chemical composition from the outer cellular matter (or cytoplasm); but both sub­ stances are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur; both belong to the remarkable group of the albuminates, the nitrogenous carbonates that are distin­ guished for the extraordinary size of their molecules and the unstable arrangement of the numerous atoms (more than a thousand) that compose them. There are, however, still simpler organisms in which the nucleus and the body of the cell have not yet been differentiated. These are the monera, the whole living body of which is merely a homogeneous particle of plasm (the chromacea and bacteria). The well-known bacteria which now play so important a part as the causes of most dangerous infectious diseases, and the agents of putrefaction, fermentation, etc., show very clearly that organic life is only a chemical and physical process, and not the outcome of a mysterious “ vital force.” We see this still more clearly in our radiolaria, and at the same time they show us unmistakably that even the psychic activity is such a physico-chemical process. All the different I! ;i i fl ! j • 1 Ij ■ i' s | | : 1 1 1 1 | ! 1 f | | 1 j > �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 53 functions of their cell-soul, the sense-perception of stimuli, the movement of their plasm, their nutrition, growth, and reproduction are determined by the particular chemical com­ position of each of the 4,000 species; and they have all descended, in virtue of adaptation and heredity, from the common stem-form of the naked, round parent-radiolarian (Actissa). We may instance, as a peculiarly interesting fact in the psychic life of the unicellular radiolaria, the extraordinary power of memory in them. The relative constancy with which the 4,000 species transmit the orderly and often very complex form of their protective flinty structure from generation to generation can only be explained by admitting in the builders, the invisible plasma-molecules of the pseudopodia, a fine “plastic sense of distance,” and a tenacious recollection of • the architectural power of their fathers. The fine, formless plasma-threads are always building afresh the same delicate flinty shells with an artistic trellis-work, and with protective radiating needles and supports always at the same points of their surface. The physiologist, Ewald Hering (of Leipsic), had spoken in 1870 of memory as “a general function of organised matter.” I myself had tried to explain the mole­ cular features of heredity by the memory of the plasma-mole­ cules, in my essay on “ The Perigenesis of the Plastidules ” (1875). Recently one of the ablest of my pupils, Professor Richard Semon (of Munich, 1904), made a profound study of “Mneme as the principle of constancy in the changes of organic phenomena,” and reduced the mechanical process of reproduction to a purely physiological base. From the cell-soul and its memory in the radiolaria and other unicellular protists, we pass directly to the similar phenomenon in the ovum, the unicellular starting-point of the individual life, from which the complex multicellular frame of all the histona, or tissue-forming animals and plants, is deve­ loped. Even the human organism is at first a simple nucleated globule of plasm, about-ji^-inch in diameter, barely visible to the naked eye as a tiny point. This stem-cell (cytula) is formed at the moment when the ovum is fertilised, or mingled with the small male spermatozoon. The ovum transmits to the child by heredity the personal traits of the mother, the sperm-cell those of the father; and this hereditary trans­ mission extends to the finest characteristics of the soul as well as of the body. The modern research as to heredity, which �54 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION occupies so much space now in biological literature, but was only started by . Darwin in 1859, is directed immediately to the visible material processes of impregnation. The very interesting and important phenomena of impregna­ tion have only been known to us in detail for thirty years. It has been shown conclusively, after a number of delicate investigations, that the individual development of the embryo from the stem-cell or fertilised ovum is controlled by the same laws in . all cases. The stem-cell divides and subdivides rapidly into a number of simple cells. From these a few simple organs, the germinal layers, are formed at first; later on the various organs, of which there is no trace in the early embryo, are built up out of these. The biogenetic law teaches us how, in this development, the original features of the ancestral history are reproduced or recapitulated in the em­ bryonic processes; and these facts in turn can only be explained by the unconscious memory of the plasm, the “ mneme of the living substance ” in the germ-cells and especially in their nuclei. One important result of these modern discoveries was the prominence given to the fact that the personal soul has a beginning of existence, and that we can determine the precise moment in which this takes place; it is when the parent cells, the ovum and spermatozoon, coalesce. Hence what we call the soul of man or the animal has not pre-existed, but begins its career at the moment of impregnation ; it is bound up with the chemical constitution of the plasm, which is the material vehicle of heredity in the nucleus of the maternal ovum and the paternal spermatozoon. One cannot see how a being that thus has a beginning of existence can afterwards prove to be “immortal.” Further, a candid examination of the simple cell-soul in the unicellular infusoria, and of the dawn of the individual soul in the unicellular germ of man and the higher animals, proves at once that psychic action does not necessarily postulate a fully formed nervous system, as was previously believed. There is no such system in many of the lower animals, or any of the plants, yet we find psychic activities, especially sensa­ tion, irritability, and reflex action everywhere. All living plasm has a psychic life, and in this sense the psyche is a partial function of organic life generally. But the higher psychic functions, particularly the phenomena of conscious­ ness, only appear gradually in the higher animals, in which �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 55 (in consequence of a division of labour among the organs) the nervous system has assumed these functions. It is particularly interesting to glance at the central nervous system of the vertebrates, the great stem of which we regard ourselves as the crowning point. Here again the anatomical and embryological facts speak a clear and unambiguous language. In all vertebrates, from the lowest fishes up to man, the psychic organ makes its appearance in the embryo, in the same form—a simple cylindrical tube on the dorsal side t of the embryonic body, in the middle line. The anterior section of this “ medullary tube ” expands into a club-shaped vesicle, which is the beginning of the brain ; the posterior and thinner section becomes the spinal cord. The cerebral vesicle divides, by transverse constrictions, into three, then four, and eventually five vesicles. The most important of .these is the first, the cerebrum, the organ of the highest psychic functions. The more the intelligence develops in the higher vertebrates, the larger, more voluminous, and more specialised does the cerebrum become. In particular, the grey mantle or cortex of the cerebrum, its most important part, only attains in the higher mammals the degree of quantitative and qualitative .development that qualifies it to be the “organ of mind” in the narrower sense. Through the famous discoveries, of Paul Flechsig eleven years ago we were enabled to distinguish eight fields in the cortex, four of which serve as the internal centres of sense-perception, and the four that lie between these are the thought-centres (or association-centres) of the higher psychic faculties—the association’ of impressions, the forma­ tion of ideas and concepts, induction and deduction. This real organ of mind, the phronema, is not yet developed in the lower mammals. It is only gradually built up in the more advanced, exactly in proportion as their intelligence increases. It is only in the most intelligent forms of the placentals, the higher ungulates (horse, elephant), the carnivores (fox, dog), and especially the primates, that the phronema attains the high grade of development that leads us from the anthropoid apes direct to the savage, and from him to civilised man. We have learned a good deal about the special significance of the various parts of the brain, as organs of specific functions, by the progress of the modern science of experi­ mental physiology. Careful experiments by Goltz, Munk, Bernard, and many other physiologists, have shown that the normal consciousness, speech, and the internal sense-percep­ �56 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION tions, are connected with definite areas of the cortex, and that these various parts of the soul are destroyed when the organic areas connected with them are injured. But in this respect Nature has unconsciously given us the most instructive experiments. Diseases in these various areas show how their functions are partially or totally extinguished when the cere­ bral cells that compose them (the neurona or ganglionic cells) are partially or entirely destroyed. Here again Virchow, who was the first to make a careful microscopic study of the finest changes in the diseased cells, and so explain the nature of the disease, did pioneer work. I still remember very well a spectacle of this kind (in the summer of 1855, at Wurz­ burg), which made a deep impression on me. Virchow’s sharp eye had detected a small suspicious spot in the cerebrum of a lunatic, though there seemed to be nothing remarkable about it on superficial examination. He handed it to me for microscopic examination, and I found that a large number of the ganglionic cells were affected, partly by fatty degenera­ tion and partly by calcification. The luminous remarks that my great teacher made on these and similar finds in other cases of mental disorder, confirmed my conviction of the unity of the human organism and the inseparable connection of mind and body, which he himself at that time expressly shared. When he abandoned this Monistic conception of the psychic life for Dualism and Mysticism twenty years afterwards (especially after his Munich speech in 1877), we must attri­ bute this partly to his psychological metamorphosis, and partly to the political motives of which I spoke in the last chapter. We find another series of strong arguments in favour of our Monistic psychology in the individual development of the soul in the child and the young animal. We know that the new-born child has as yet no consciousness, no intelligence, no independent judgment and thought. We follow the gradual development of these higher faculties step by step in the first years of life, in strict proportion to the anatomical development of the cortex with which they are bound up. The inquiries into the child-soul which Wilhelm Preyer began in Jena twenty-five years ago, his careful “observations of the mental development of man in his early years,” and the supplementary research of several more recent physiologists, have shown, from the ontogenetic side, that the soul is not a special immaterial entity, but the sum-total of a number of �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 57 connected functions of the brain. When the brain dies, the soul comes to an end. We have further proof in the .stem-history of the soul, which we gather from the comparative psychology of the lower and higher mammals, and of savage and civilised rapes. Modern ethnography shows us in actual existence the various stages through which the mind rose to its present height. The most primitive races, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Australian natives, are very little above the mental life of the anthropoid apes. From the higher savages we pass by a complete gradation of stages to the most civilised races. But what a gulf there is, even here, between the genius of a Goethe, a Darwin, or a Lamarck, and an ordinary philistine or third-rate official. All these facts point to one conclusion : the human soul has only reached its present height by a long period of gradual evolution; it differs in degree, not in kind, from the soul of the higher mammals; and thus it cannot in any case be immortal. That a large number of educated people still cling to the dogma of personal immortality in spite of these luminous proofs, is owing to the great power of conservative tradition and the evil methods of instruction that stamp these untenable dogmas deep on the growing mind in early years. It is for that very reason that the Churches strive to keep the schools under their power at any cost; they can control and exploit the adults at will, if independent thought and judgment have been stifled in the earlier years. This brings us to the interesting question : What is the position of the “ecclesiastical evolution” of the Jesuits (the “latest course of Darwinism ”), as regards this great question of the soul? Man is, according to Wasmann, the image of God and a unique, immaterial being, differing from all other animals in the possession of an immortal soul, and therefore having a totally different origin from them. Man’s immortal soql is, according to this Jesuit sophistry, “spiritual and sensitive,” while the animal soul is sensitive only. God has implanted his own spirit in man, and associated it with an animal soul for the period of life. It is true that Wasmann believes even man’s body to have been created directly by God; but, in view of the overwhelming proofs of our animal descent, he leaves open the possibility of a development from a series of other animals, in which case the Divine spirit would be breathed into him in the end. The Christian Fathers, �58 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION who were much occupied with the introduction of the soul into the human embryo, tell us that the immortal soul enters the soulless embryo on the fortieth day after conception in the case of the boy, and on the eightieth day in the case of the girl. If Wasmann . supposes that there was a similar intro­ duction of the soul in the development of the race, he must postulate a moment in the history of the anthropoid apes when God sent his spirit into the hitherto unspiritual soul of the ape. When we look at the matter impartially in the light of pure reason, the belief in immortality is wholly inconsistent with the facts of evolution and of physiology. The onto­ genetic dogma of the older Church, that the soul is introduced into the soulless body at a particular moment of its embryonic development, is just as absurd as the phylogenetic dogma of the most modern Jesuits, that the Divine spirit was breathed into the frame of an anthropoid ape at a certain period (in the Tertiary period), and so converted it into an immortal soul. We may examine and test this belief as we will, we can find in it nothing but a piece of mystic superstition. It is maintained solely by the great power of tradition and the support of Conservative governments, the leaders of which have no personal belief in these “revelations,” but cling to the practical conviction that throne and altar must support each other. They unfortunately overlook the circumstance that the throne is apt to become merely the footstool to the altar, and that the Church exploits the State for its own, not the State’s, good. We learn further, from the history of this dogma, that the belief in immortality did not find its way into science until a comparatively late date. It is not found in the great Monistic natural philosophers who, six centuries before the time of Christ, evinced a profound insight into the real nature of the world. It is not found in Democritus and Empedocles, in Seneca and Lucretius Carus. It is not found in the older Oriental religions, Buddhism, the ancient religion of the, Chinese, or Confucianism; in fact, there is no question of individual persistence after death in the Pentateuch or the earlier books of the Old Testament (which were written before the Babylonian Exile). It wras Plato and his pupil, Aristotle, that found a place for it in their dualistic metaphysics; and its agreement with the Christian and Mohammedan teaching secured for it a very widespread acceptance. �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 59 Another psychological dogma, the belief in man’s free-will, is equally inconsistent with the truth of evolution. Modern physiology shows clearly that the will is never really free in man or in the animal, but determined by the organisation of the brain ; this in turn is determined in its individual character by the laws of heredity and the influence of the environment. It is only because the apparent freedom of the will has such a great practical significance in the province of religion, morality, sociology, and law, that it still forms the subject of the most contradictory claims. Theoretically, determinism, or the doctrine of the necessary character of our volitions, was established long ago. With the belief in the absolute freedom of the will and the personal immortality of the soul is associated, in the minds of many highly educated people, a third article of faith, the belief in a personal God. It is well known that this belief, often wrongly represented as an indispensable foundation of religion, assumes the most widely varied shapes. As a rule, however, it is an open or covert anthropomorphism. God is conceived as the “Supreme Being,” but turns out, on closer examination, to be an idealised man. According to the Mosaic narrative, “God made man to his own image and likeness,” but it is usually the reverse; “Man made God according to his own image and likeness.” This idealised man becomes creator and architect and produces the world, forming the various species of plants and animals like a modeller, governing the world like a wise and all-powerful monarch, and, at the “Last Judgment,” rewarding the good and punishing the wicked like a rigorous jud^e. The childish conceptions of this extramundane God, who is set over against the world as an independent being, the personal creator, maintainer, and ruler of all things, are quite incompatible with the advanced science of the nineteenth century, especially with its two greatest triumphs, the law of substance and the law of Monistic evolution. Critical philosophy, moreover, long ago pronounced its doom. In the first place, the most famous critical thinker, Immanuel Kant, proved in his Critique of Pure Reason that absolute science affords no support to the three central dogmas of metaphysics, the personal God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. It is true that he afterwards (in the course of his dualistic and dogmatic metamorphosis) taught that we must believe these three great mystic forces, �6o LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION and that they are indispensable postulates of practical reason ; and that the latter must take precedence over pure reason. Modern German philosophy, which clamours for a “ return to Kant,” sees his chief distinction in this impossible reconcilia­ tion of polar contradictions. The Churches, and the ruling powers in alliance with them, accord a welcome to this diametrical contradiction, recognised by all candid readers of the Königsberg philosopher, between the two reasons. They use the confusion that results for the purpose of putting the light of the creeds in the darkness of doubting reason, and imagine that they save religion in this way. Whilst we are engaged with the important subject of religion, we must refute the charge, often made, and renewed of recent years, that our Monistic philosophy and the theory of evolution that forms its chief foundation destroy religion. It is only opposed to those lower forms of religion that are based on superstition and ignorance, and would hold man’s reason in bondage by empty formalism and belief in' the miraculous, in order to control it for political purposes. This is chiefly the case with Romanism or Ultramontanism, that pitiful caricature of pure Christianity that still plays so im­ portant a part in the world. Luther would turn in his grave if he could see the predominance of the Roman Centre party in the German Empire to-day. We find the papacy, thé deadly enemy of Protestant Germany, controlling its destiny, and the Reichstag submitting willingly to be led by the Jesuits. Not a voice do we hear raised in it against the three most dangerous and mischievous institutions of Romanism—the obligatory celibacy of the clergy, the confessional, and in­ dulgences. Though these later institutions of the Roman Church have nothing to do with the original teaching of the Church and pure Christianity ; though their immoral conse­ quences, so prejudicial to the life of the family and the State, are known to all, they exist just as they did before the Reformation. Unfortunately, many German princes foster the ambition of the Roman clergy, making their “Canossajourney ” to Rome, and bending the knee to the great charlatan at the Vatican. It is also very regrettable that the increasing tendency to external show and festive parade at what is called “the new court ” does grave injury to real and inner religion. We have a striking instance of this external religion in the^ new cathedral at Berlin, which many would have us regard as �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 6r “ Catholic,” not Protestant and Evangelical. I often met in India priests and pilgrims who believed they were pleasing their God by turning prayer-wheels, or setting up prayer-mills that were set in motion by the wind. One might utilise the modern invention of automatic machines for the same pur­ poses, and set up praying automata in the new cathedral, or indulgence-machines that would give relief from lighter sins for one mark [shilling], and from graver sins for twenty marks. It would prove a great source of revenue to the Church, especially if similar machines were set up in the other churches that have lately been erected in Berlin at a cost of millions of marks. It would have been better to have spent the money on schools. These observations on the more repellent characters of modern orthodoxy and piety may be taken as some reply to the sharp attacks to which I have been exposed for forty years, and which have lately been renewed with great violence. The spokesmen of Catholic and Evangelical beliefs, especially the Romanist Germania and the Lutheran Reichsbote, have vied with each other in deploring my lectures as “a desecration of this venerable hall,” and in damning my theory of evolu-» tion—without, of course, making any attempt to refute its scientific truth. They have, in their Christian charity, thought fit to put sandwich-men at the doors of this room, to dis­ tribute scurrilous attacks on my person and my teaching to those who enter. They have made a generous use of the fanatical calumnies that the court chaplain, Stocker, the theologian, Loofs, the philologist, Dennert, and other opponents of my Riddle of the Universe, have disseminated, and to which I make a brief reply at the end of that work. I pass by the many untruths of these zealous protagonists of theology. We men of science have a different conception of truth from that which prevails in ecclesiastical circles.1 1 I may remind those who think that the hall of the Musical Academy is “desecrated” by my lectures, that it was in the very same place that Alexander von Humboldt delivered, seventy-seven years ago (1.828), the remarkable lectures that afterwards made up his Cosmos. The great traveller, whose clear mind had recognised the unity of Nature, and had, with Goethe, discovered therein the real knowledge of God, endeavoured to convey his thoughts in popular form to the educated Berlin public, and to establish the universality of natural law. It was my aim to establish, as regards the organic world, precisely what Humboldt had proved to exist in inorganic nature. I wanted to show how the great advance of modern biology (since Darwin’s, time) enables us to solve I the most difficult of all problems, the historical development of plants �62 LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION As regards the relation of science to Christianity, I will only point out that it is quite irreconcilable with the mystic and supernatural Christian beliefs, but that it fully recognises the high ethical value of Christian morality. It is true that the highest commands of the Christian religion, especially those of sympathy and brotherly love, are not discoveries of its own ; the golden rule was taught and practised centuries before the time of Christ. However, Christianity has the dis­ tinction of. preaching and developing it with a fresh force. In its time it has had a beneficial influence on the development of civilisation,, though in the Middle Ages the Roman Church became, with its Inquisition, its witch-drowning, its burning of heretics, and its religious wars, the bloodiest caricature of the gentle religion of love. Orthodox historical Christianity is not directly destroyed by modern science, but by its own learned and zealous theologians. The enlightened Protestant­ ism that was so effectively advocated by Schleiermacher in Berlin eighty years ago, the later works of Feuerbach, the inquiries into the lif-e of Jesus of David Strauss and Ernest Renan, the lectures recently delivered here by Delitzsch and aHarnack, have left very little of what strict orthodoxy regards as the indispensable foundations of historical Christianity. Kalthoff, of Bremen, goes so far as to declare that all Christian traditions are myths, and that the development of Christianity is a necessary outcome of the civilisation of the time. In view of this broadening tendency in theology and philo­ sophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is an unfortunate anachronism that the Ministers of Public Instruct tion of Prussia and Bavaria sail in the wake of the Catholic Church, and seek to instil the spirit of the Jesuits in both lower and higher education. It is only a few weeks since thé Prussian Minister of Worship made a dangerous attempt to suppress academic freedom, the palladium of mental life in Germany. This increasing réaction recalls the sad days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when thousands of the finest citizens of Germany migrated to North America, in order to develop their mental powers in a free atmosphere. This selective process formed a blessing to the United States, but it was certainly very injurious to Germany. Large and animals in humanity. Humboldt in his day earned the most lively approval and gratitude of all free-thinking and truth-seeking men, and the displeasure and suspicion of the orthodox and conservative courtiers at Berlin. �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 63 numbers of weak and servile characters and sycophants were thus favoured. The fossilised ideas of many of our leading jurists seem to take us back sometimes to the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, while the palaeozoic rhetoric of our theo­ logians and synods even goes back to the Permian and Carboniferous epochs. However, we must not take too seriously the anxiety that this increasing political and clerical reaction causes us. We must remember the vast resources of civilisation that are seen to-day in our enormous international intercourse, and must have confidence in the helpful exchange of ideas between East and West that is being effected daily by our means of transit. Even in Germany the darkness that now prevails will at length give place to the dazzling light of the sun. Nothing, in my opinion, will contribute more to that end than the unconditional victory of the idea of evolution. Beside the law of evolution, and closely connected with it, we have that great triumph of modern science, the law of substance—the law of the conservation of matter (Lavoisier, 1789), and of the conservation of energy (Robert Mayer, 1842). These two laws are irreconcilable with the three central dogmas of metaphysics, which so -many educated people still regard as the most precious treasures of their spiritual life— the belief in a personal God, the personal immortality of the soul, and the liberty of the human will. But these great objects of belief, so intimately bound up with numbers of our treasured achievements and institutions, are not on that account driven out of the world. They merely cease to pose as truths in the realm of pure science. As imaginative creations, they retain a certain value in the world of poetry. Here they will not only, as they have done hitherto, furnish ’thousands of the finest and most lofty motives for every branch of art—sculpture, painting, or music—but they will still have a high ethical and social value in the education of the young and in the organisation of society. Just as we derive artistic and ethical inspiration from the legends of classical antiquity (such as the Hercules myth, the Odyssey and the Iliad) and the story of William Tell, so we shall con­ tinue to do in regard to the stories of the Christian mythology. But we must do the same with the poetical conceptions of other religions, which have given the most varied forms to the transcendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. Thus the noble warmth of art will remain, together with— || ? ; ; �LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION 64 not in opposition to, but in harmony with-—the splendid light of science, one of the most precious possessions of the human mind. As Goethe said : “ He who has science and art has religion ; he who has not these two had better have religion.” Our Monistic system, the “connecting link between religion and science,” brings God and the world into unity in the sense that Goethe willed, the sense that Spinoza clearly ex­ pressed long ago and Giordano Bruno had sealed with his martyrdom. It has been said repeatedly of late that Goethe was an orthodox Christian. A few years ago a young orator quoted him in support of the wonderful dogmas of the Christian religion. We may point out that Goethe himself expressly said he was “a decided non-Christian.” The “great heathen of Weimar ” has given the clearest expression . to his Pantheistic views in his noblest poems, Faust, Prome­ theus, and God and the World. How could so vig'orous a thinker, in whose mind the evolution of organic life ran through millions of years, have shared the narrow belief of a Jewish prophet and enthusiast who sought to give up his life for humanity 1,900 years ago? , Our Monistic god, the all-embracing essence of the world, the Nature-god of Spinoza and Goethe, is identical with the 1 eternal, all-inspiring energy, and is one, in eternal and infinite £ substance, with space-filling matter. It “lives and moves in | all things,” as the Gospel says. 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The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Last words on evolution : a popular retrospect and summary Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August [1834-1919] McCabe, Joseph [1867-1955] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 64 p. ; 18 cm. Series title: Pamphlets for the Millions Series number: No. 8 Notes: Publisher's advertisements inside and on back cover. Portrait of the author on front cover. 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Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1912 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N295 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Science Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Last words on evolution : a popular retrospect and summary), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Evolution NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/11f23aed6bb1347d5a24b0f53b0f4662.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=Tu4mk8lPROS8OOOsr7YrKGR%7EpmxNVr%7Ec%7EqIR4TkntJkpOeH1kwHh73OBilFW2vm82yJZX3PKeBTclu0gjMN0EhmVjEypu%7EdQUvOrv2BfCzdWyvgcOqK%7EFbydOU741zLqakZ9seo-nMr09eC-7p%7EVh-qcuFNy1J5hhPe45QWsGw8tK%7EAgQau94LzMuilLqI4EFAgcIxyzOiAJZhuhfYgi91HEvZRD6TnZNgbxMnHhQw4hO2dbW5LQfvza2qRhrkEr8xxk3I-WoXWbWy7xfi7KVVRNSzBIF6hFpnilyRQFvP6hLFR1A3lldCLxKrS6L7HhQF8DIpVzT1VkQ62rQ9SDfg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 6899782486875e2767d286b5c1e407f4 PDF Text Text NO. ll.- R. P. A. CHEAP REPRINTS. A Historic Work & The Origin of Species CHARLES DARWIN WATTS & Co., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. (issued for the rationalist press association, limited) ............................... ......................... The Next R.P.A. CHEAP REPRINT will be “LECTURES AND ESSAYS.” �2S. 6d. net, by post 2s. An Easy Outline of Evolution. By DENNIS HIRD (Principal of Ruskin College). > �^2377 $£ — -ry ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES .I yr ■ �PUBLISHERS’ NOTE This edition of The Origin of Species is an exact reprint of the first edition (published 1859-60), which has now gone out of copyright. The third and subsequent editions were considerably revised and amplified by Mr. Darwin, but without any alteration of fundamental importance being made. He strengthened, but did not rebuild, the structure. Mr. John Murray, the original publisher, is now issuing the final edition in cloth binding at 2s. 6d. net, and in paper covers at is. net. Students and all admirers of Darwin should compare the first and last editions of this great work in order to fully understand the development of the doctrine of Evolution. �ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A. [issued for the rationalist press association, limited] WATTS & CO., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. 1903 ��CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER Introduction y ...... I. Variation under Domestication II. Variation under Nature III. Struggle for Existence - n .... 25 - 31 - - IV. Natural Selection ..... 39 V. Laws of Variation ..... 58 VI. Difficulties of Theory .... VII. Instinct VIII. Hybridism 73,, 87- - - - - - - 10a IX. On the Imperfection of the Geological Record 114 X. On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings 127 XI. Geographical Distribution .... XII.Geographical Distribution—Continued - - 140 154 XIII. Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings : Morpho­ logy : Embryology : Rudimentary Organs XIV. Recapitulation and Conclusion Index -* - - 165 - 183 196 �> . *■ 3 p _ ' !>” k k ii > .... ■ *'*s f" �ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES INTRODUCTION When on board H. M. S. Beagle, as [ this Abstract. naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumu­ lating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years’ work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable : from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. My work is now nearly finished ; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclu­ sions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work—the latter having read my sketch of 1844—honoured me by thinking it advisible to publish, with Mr. Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts. This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will �8 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES suffice. No.one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is dis­ cussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and argu­ ments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done. I much regret that want of space pre­ vents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown to me. I cannot, however, let this opportunity pass without expressing my deep obligations to Dr. Hooker, who for the last fifteen years has aided me in every possible way by his large stores of knowledge and his excellent judgment. In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic' beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate, food, etc., as the only possible cause of variation. In one very limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attri­ bute to mere external conditions the structure, for instance, of the wood­ pecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself. The author of the Vestiges of Creation would, I presume, say that, after a certain unknown number of generations, some bird had given birth to a woodpecker, and some plant to the mistletoe, and that these had been produced perfect as we now see them; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it leaves the case of the coadaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life untouched and unexplained. It is, therefore, of the highest impor­ tance to gain a clear insight into the means of modification and coadaptation. �INTRODUCTION At the commencement of my observa­ tions it seemed to me probable that a careful study of domesticated animals and of cultivated plants would offer the best chance of making out this obscure problem. Nor have I been disappointed; in this and in all other perplexing cases I have invariably found that our know­ ledge, imperfect though it be, of variation under domestication, afforded the best and safest clue. I may venture to express my conviction of the high value of such studies, although they have been very commonly neglected by naturalists. From these considerations I shall devote the first chapter of this Abstract to Variation under Domestication. We shall thus see that a large amount of hereditary modification is at least pos­ sible; and, what is equally or more important, we shall see how great is the power of man in accumulating by his Selection successive slight variations. I will then pass on to the variability of species in a state of nature; but I shall, unfortunately, be compelled to treat this subject far too briefly, as it can be treated properly only by giving long catalogues of facts. We shall, however, be enabled to discuss what circumstances are most favourable to variation. In the next chapter the Struggle for Existence among all organic beings throughout the world, which inevi­ tably follows from the high geometrical ratio of their increase, will be treated of. This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable king­ doms. As many more individuals of 9 each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for exis­ tence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and some­ times varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life, and leads to what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next, chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correla­ tion of growth. In the four succeeding chapters the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given— namely, first, the difficulties of transi­ tions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly-developed being or elaborately-constructed organ; secondly, the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals; thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when inter­ crossed; and, fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In the next chapter I shall consider the geological succession of organic beings throughout time; in the eleventh and twelfth,* their geographical distribution throughout �IO ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES space; in the thirteenth, their classifica­ tion or mutual affinities, both when maturp and in an embryonic condition. In-the last chapter I shall give a brief recapitulation of the whole work, and a few concluding remarks. No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual rela­ tions of all the beings which live around us. Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare ? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modifica­ tion of every inhabitant of this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world during the many past geo­ logical epochs in its history. Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view Mitch most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created —is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknow­ ledged varieties of any one species are1 the descendants of that species. Further­ more, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main, but not exclusive, means of modification. �Chapter I. VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION Causes of Variability—Effects of Habit—Correla­ tion of Growth—Inheritance—Character of Domestic Varieties—Difficulty of distinguish­ ing between Varieties and Species—Origin of Domestic Varieties from one or more Species—■ Domestic Pigeons, their Differences and Origin —Principle of Selection anciently followed, its Effects—-Methodical and Unconscious Selection—Unknown Origin of our Domestic Productions — Circumstances favourable to Man’s power of Selection. When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. When we reflect on ;the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, I think we are driven to con­ clude that this great variability is simply due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent-species have been exposed under nature. There is also, I think, some probability in the view pro­ pounded by Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly connected with excess of food. It seems pretty clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation ; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally con­ tinues to vary for many generations. No case is on record of a variable being ceasing to be variable under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still often yield new varieties ; our oldest domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification. It has been disputed at what period of life the causes of variability, whatever they may be, generally act; whether during the early or late period of development of the embryo, or at the instant of conception. Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s experiments show that unnatural treatment of the embryo causes monstrosities; and monstrosities cannot be separated by any clear line of distinction from mere variations. But I am strongly inclined to suspect that the most frequent cause of variability, may be attributed to the male and female repro­ ductive elements having been affected prior to the act of conception. Several reasons make me believe in this ; but the chief one is the remarkable effect which confine­ ment or cultivation has on the function of the reproductive system, this system appearing to be far more susceptible than any other part of the organisation to the action of any change in the conditions of life. Nothing is more easy than to. tame an animal, and few things more difficult . than to get it to breed freely under con­ finement, even in the many cases when the male and female unite. How many animals there are which will not breed, though living long under not very close confinement in their native country! This is generally attributed to vitiated instincts; but how many cultivated plants display the utmost vigour, and yet rarely or never seed ! In some few such cases it has been discovered that very trifling changes, such as a little more or less water at some particular period of growth, will determine whether or not the plant sets a seed. I cannot here enter on the copious details which I have collected on this curious subject ; but to show how singular the laws are which determine the reproduction of animals under confinement, I may just mention that carnivorous animals, even from the tropics, breed in this country pretty freely under confinement, with the exception of the plantigrades or bear family; whereas carnivorous birds, with the rarest exceptions, hardly ever lay fertile eggs. Many exotic plants have pollen utterly worthless, in the same exact condition as in the most sterile hybrids. When, on the �12 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES one hand, we see domesticated animals and plants, though often weak and sickly, yet breeding quite freely under confine­ ment ; and when, on the other hand, we see individuals, though taken young from a state of nature, perfectly tamed, longlived, and healthy (of which I could give numerous instances), yet having their repro­ ductive system so seriously affected by unperceived causes as to fail in acting, we need not be surprised at this system, when it does act under confinement, acting not quite regularly, and producing offspring not perfectly like their parents. Sterility has been said to be the bane of horticulture ; but on this view we owe variability to the same cause which pro­ duces sterility ; and variability is the source •of all the choicest productions of the garden. I may add that, as some organ­ isms will breed freely under the most unnatural conditions (for instance, the rabbit and ferret kept in hutches), showing that their reproductive system has not Been thus affected ; so will some animals and plants withstand domestication or cultivation, and vary very slightly—perhaps hardly more than in a state of nature. A long list could easily be given of “sporting plants”; by this term gardeners mean a single bud or offset, which suddenly assumes a new and sometimes very different character from that of the rest of the plant. Such buds can be propagated by grafting, ■etc., and sometimes by seed. These “ sports ” are extremely rare under naturfe, but far from rare under cultivation ; and in this case we see that the treatment of the parent has affected a bud or offset, and not the ovules or pollen. But it is the opinion of most physiologists that there is no essential difference between a bud and an ovule in their earliest stages of formation ; so that, in fact, “ sports ” support my view, that variability may be largely attributed to the ovules or pollen, or to both, having been affected by the treatment of the parent prior to the act of conception. These cases anyhow show that variation is not neces­ sarily connected, as some authors have supposed, with the act of generation. Seedlings from the same fruit and the young of the same litter, sometimes differ considerably from each other, though both the young and the parents, as Muller has remarked, have apparently been exposed to exactly the same conditions of life ; and this shows how unimportant the direct effects of the conditions of life are in com­ parison with the laws of reproduction, of growth, and of inheritance; for had the action of the conditions been direct, if any of the young had -varied, all would probably have varied in the same manner. To judge how much, in the case of any variation, we should attribute to the direct action of heat, moisture, light, food, etc., is most difficult: my impression is, that with animals such agencies have produced very little direct effect, though apparently more in the case of plants. Under this point of view, Mr. Buckman’s recent experiments on plants are extremely valuable. When all or nearly all the individuals exposed to certain conditions are affected in the same way, the change at first appears to be directly due to such conditions; but in some cases it can be shown that quite opposite conditions produce similar changes of structure. Nevertheless, some slight amount of change may, I think, be attri­ buted to the direct action of the conditions of life—as, in some cases, increased size from amount of food, colour from particular kinds of food or from light, and perhaps the thickness of fur from climate. Habit also has a decided influence, as in the period of flowering with plants when transported from one climate to another. In animals it has a more marked effect ; for instance, I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild duck; and I presume that this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parent. The great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats in countries where they are habitually milked, in comparison with the state of these organs in other countries, is another instance of the effect of use. Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears ; and the view suggested by some authors, that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals not being much alarmed by danger, seems probable. There are many laws regulating varia­ tion, some few of which can be dimly seen, and will be hereafter briefly mentioned. I will here only allude to what may be called correlation of growth. Any change in the embryo or larva will almost certainly entail changes in the mature animal. In monstrosities the correlations between quite distinct parts are very curious ; and many instances are given in Isidore Geoffroy �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION St. Hilaire’s great work on this subject. Breeders believe that long limbs are almost always accompanied by an elongated head. Some instances of correlation are quite whimsical: thus cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; colour and constitutional peculiarities go together, of which many remarkable cases could be given among ani­ mals and plants. From the facts collected by Heusinger, it appears that white sheep and pigs are differently affected from coloured individuals by certain vegetable poisons. Hairless dogs have imperfect teeth ; long-haired and coarse-haired ani­ mals are apt to have, as is asserted, long or many horns ; pigeons with feathered feet have skin between their outer toes ; pigeons with short beaks have small feet, and those with long beaks large feet. Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly uncon­ sciously modify other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of the correla­ tion of growth. The result of the various, quite unknown, or dimly-seen laws of variation is infinitely complex and diversified. It is well worth while carefully to study the several treatises published on some of our old cultivated plants, as on the hyacinth, potato, even the dahlia, etc.; and it is really surprising to note the endless points in structure and constitution in which the varieties and sub­ varieties differ slightly from each other. The whole organisation seems to have become plastic, and tends to depart in some small degree from that of the parental type. . . . , . , . Any variation which is not inherited is unimportant for us. But the number and diversity of inheritable deviations of struc­ ture, both those of slight and those of considerable physiological importance, is endless. Dr. Prosper Lucas’s treatise, in two large volumes, is the fullest and the best on this subject. No breeder doubts how strong is the tendency to inheritance : like produces like is his fundamental belief: doubts have been thrown on this principle by theoretical writers alone. When any deviation of structure often appears, and we see it in the father and child, we cannot tell whether it may not be due to the same cause having acted on both ; but when among individuals, apparently exposed to the same conditions, any very rare devia­ tion, due to some extraordinary combination of circumstances, appears in the parent— say, once among several million individuals —and it reappears in the child, the mere 13 doctrine of chances almost compels us to attribute its reappearance to inheritance. Every one must have heard of cases of albinism, prickly skin, hairy bodies, etc., appearing in several members of the same family. If strange and rare deviations of structure are truly inherited, less strange and commoner deviations may be freely admitted to be inheritable. Perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject would be to look at the inheritance of every character whatever as the rule, and non­ inheritance as the anomaly. The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why a peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, or in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so ; why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grand­ mother or other more remote ancestor why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. It is a fact of some little impor­ tance to us, that peculiarities appearing in the males of our domestic breeds are often transmitted either exclusively, or in a much greater degree, to males alone. A much more important rule, which I think may be trusted, is that, at whatever period of life a peculiarity first appears, it tends to appear in the offspring at a corresponding age, though sometimes earlier. In many cases this could not be otherwise: thus the inherited peculiarities in the horns of cattle could appear only in the offspring when nearly mature; peculiarities in the silk­ worm are known to appear at the corre­ sponding caterpillar or cocoon stage. But hereditary diseases and some other facts make me believe that the rule has a wider extension, and that when there is no appa­ rent reason why a peculiarity should appear at any particular age, yet that it does tend to appear in the offspring at the same period at which it first appeared in the parent. I believe this rule to be of the highest importance in explaining the laws of embryology. These remarks are of course confined to the first appearance of the peculiarity, and not to its primary cause, which may have acted on the ovules or male element ; in nearly the same manner as in the crossed offspring from a short-horned cow by a long-horned bull, the greater length of horn, though appearing late in life, is clearly due to the male element. Having alluded to the subject of rever­ sion, I may here refer to a statement often �14 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES made by naturalists—namely, that our domestic varieties, when run wild, gradually but certainly revert in character to their aboriginal stocks. Hence it has been argued that no deductions can be drawn from domestic races to species in a state of nature. I have in vain endeavoured to discover on what decisive facts the above statement' has so often and so boldly been made. There would be great difficulty in proving its truth : we may safely conclude that very many of the most strongly-marked domestic varieties could not possibly live in a wild state. In many cases we do not know what the aboriginal stock was, and so could not tell whether or not nearly perfect reversion had ensued. It would be quite necessary, in order to prevent the effects of intercrossing, that only a single variety should be turned loose in its new home. Nevertheless, as our varieties cer­ tainly do occasionally revert in some of their characters to ancestral forms, it seems to me not improbable that, if we could succeed in naturalising, or were to cultivate, during many generations, the several races, for instance, of the cabbage, in very poor soil (in which case, however, some effect would have to be attributed to the direct action of the poor soil), that they would to a large extent, or even wholly, revert to the wild aboriginal stock. Whether or not the experiment would succeed is not of great importance for our line of argument; for by the experiment itself the conditions ■of life are changed. If it could be shown that our domestic varieties manifested a strong tendency to reversion—that is, to lose their acquired characters, while kept under the same conditions, and while kept in a considerable body, so that free inter­ crossing might check, by blending together, any slight deviations in their structure—in such case I grant that we could deduce nothing from domestic varieties in regard to species. But there is not a shadow of evidence in favour of this view : to assert that we could not breed our cart and race horses, long and short horned cattle, and poultry of various breeds, and esculent vegetables, for an almost infinite number of generations, would be opposed to all experience. I may add that, when under nature the conditions of life do change, variations and reversions of character pro­ bably do occur ; but natural selection, as will hereafter be explained, will determine how far the new characters thus arising shall be preserved. When we look to the hereditary varieties 1 or races of our domestic animals and plants, and compare them with closely-allied species, we generally perceive in each domestic race, as already remarked, less uniformity of character than in true species. Domestic races of the same species, also, often have a somewhat monstrous character; by which I mean that, although differingfrom each other, and from other species of the same genus, in several trifling respects, they often differ in an extreme degree in some one part, both when compared one with another, and more especially when compared with all the species in nature to which they are nearest allied. With these exceptions (and with that of the perfect fertility of varieties when crossed—a subject hereafter to be discussed), domestic races of the same species differ from each other in the same manner as, only in most cases in a lesser degree than, do closely-allied species of the same genus in a state of nature. I think this must be admitted, when we find that there are hardly any domestic races, either among animals or plants, which have not been ranked by competent judges as mere varieties, and by other competent judges as the descendants of aboriginally distinct species. If any marked distinction existed between domestic races and species, this source of doubt could not so per­ petually recur. It has often been stated that domestic races do not differ from each other in characters of generic value. I think it could be shown that this statement is hardly correct; but natmalists differ widely in determining what characters are of generic value, all such valuations being at present empirical. Moreover, on the view of the origin of genera which I shall presently give, we have no right to expect often to meet with generic differences in our domesticated productions. When we attempt to estimate the amount of structural difference between the domestic races of the same species, we are soon involved in doubt, from not knowing whether they have descended from one or several parent species. This point, if it could be cleared up, would be interesting ; if, for instance, it could be shown that the greyhound, bloodhound, terrier, spaniel, and bull-dog, which we all know propagate their kind so ti;uly, were the offspring of any single species, then such facts would have great weight in making us doubt about the immutability of the many very closely-allied natural species—for instance, of the many foxes—inhabiting different quarters of the world. I do not believe, as �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION we shall presently see, that the whole amount of difference between the several breeds of the dog has been produced under domestication ; 1“ believe that some small part of the difference is due to their being descended from distinct species. In the case of some other domesticated species, there is presumptive, or even strong evi­ dence, that all the breeds have descended from a single wild stock. It has often been assumed that man has chosen for domestication animals and plants having an extraordinary inherent tendency to vary, and likewise to withstand diverse climates. I do not dispute that these capacities have added largely to the value of most of our domesticated produc­ tions ; but how could a savage possibly know, when he first tamed an animal, whether it would vary in succeeding genera­ tions, and whether it would endure other climates ? Has the. little variability of the ass or guinea-fowl, or the small power of endurance of warmth by the reindeer, or of cold by the common camel, prevented their domestication ? I cannot doubt that if other animals and plants, equal in number to our domesticated productions, and belonging to equally diverse classes and countries, were taken from a state of nature, and could be made to breed for an equal number of generations under domes­ tication, they would vary on an average as largely as the parent species of our existing domesticated productions have varied. In the case of most of our anciently dom^ifcated animals and plants, I do not think it is possible to come to any definite conclusion, whether they have descended from one or several wild species. The argument mainly relied on by those who believe in the multiple origin of our domestic animals is, that we find in the most ancient records, more especially on the monuments of Egypt, much diversity in the breeds ; and that some of the breeds closely resemble, perhaps are identical with, those still existing. Even if this latter fact were found more strictly and generally true than seems to me to be the case, what does it show but that some of our breeds originated there four or five thousand years ago? But Mr. Horner’s researches have rendered it in some degree probable that man suffi­ ciently civilised to have manufactured pottery existed in the valley of the Nile thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago ; and who will pretend to say how long before these ancient periods savages, like those of Tierra del Fuego or Australia, who 15 possess a semi-domestic dog, may not have existed in Egypt ? The whole subject must, I think, remain vague; nevertheless, I may, without here entering on any details, state that, from geographical and other considerations, I think it highly probable that our domestic dogs have descended from several wild species. Knowing, as we do, that savages are very fond of taming animals, it seems to me unlikely, in the case of the dog-genus, which is distributed in a wild state through­ out the world, that since man first appeared one single species alone should have been domesticated. In regard to sheep and goats I can form no opinion. I should think, from facts communicated to me by Mr. Blyth on the habits, voice, and con­ stitution, etc., of the humped Indian cattle, that these had descended from a different aboriginal stock from our European cattle ; and several competent judges believe that these latter have had more than one wild parent. With respect to horses, from reasons which I cannot give here, I am doubtfully inclined to believe, in opposition to several authors, that all the races have descended from one wild stock. Mr. Blyth, whose opinion, from his large and varied stores of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost anyone, thinks that all the breeds of poultry have proceeded from the common wild Indian fowl (Gallus bankiva). In regard to ducks and rabbits, the breeds of which differ considerably from each other in structure, I do not doubt that they have all descended from the common wild duck and rabbit. The doctrine of the origin of our several domestic races from several aboriginal stocks has been carried to an absurd extreme by some authors. They believe that every race which breeds true, let the distinctive characters be ever so slight, has had its wild prototype. At this rate there must have existed at least a score of species of wild cattle, as many sheep, and several goats in Europe alone, and several even within Great Britain. One author believes that there formerly existed in Great Britain eleven wild species of sheep peculiar to it. When we bear in mind that Britain has now hardly one peculiar mammal, and France but few distinct from those of Germany, and conversely, and so with Hungary, Spain, etc., but that each of these kingdoms possesses several peculiar breeds of cattle, sheep, etc., we must admit that many domestic breeds have originated in Europe ; for whence could they have been �i6 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES derived, as these several countries do not possess a number of peculiar species as distinct parent-stocks ? So it is in India. Even in the case of the domestic dogs of the whole world, which I fully admit have probably descended from several wild species, I cannot doubt that there has been an immense amount of inherited variation. Who can believe that animals closely resembling the Italian greyhound, the bloodhound, the bull-dog, or Blenheim spaniel, etc.—so unlike all wild Canidae— ever existed freely in a state of nature? It has often been loosely said that all our races of dogs have been produced by the crossing of a few aboriginal species; but by crossing we can only get forms in some degree intermediate between their parents ; and, if we account for our several domestic races by this process, we must admit the former existence of the most extreme forms, as the Italian greyhound, blood­ hound, bull-dog, etc., in the wild state. Moreover, the possibility of making distinct races by crossing has been greatly exagge­ rated. There can be no doubt that a race may be modified by occasional crosses, if aided by the careful selection of those individual mongrels which present any desired character ; but that a race could be obtained nearly intermediate between two extremely different races or species, I can hardly believe. Sir J. Sebright expressly experimentised for this object, and failed. The offspring from the first cross between two pure breeds is tolerably and sometimes (as I have found with pigeons) extremely uniform, and everything seems' simple enough ; but when these mongrels are crossed one with another for several generations, hardly two of them will be alike, and then the extreme diffi­ culty, or rather utter hopelessness, of the task becomes apparent. Certainly a breed intermediate between two very distinct breeds could not be got without extreme care and long-continued selection ; nor can I find a single case on record of a per­ manent race having been thus formed. On the Breeds of the Domestic Pigeon.— Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after delibera­ tion, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed which I could purchase or obtain, and have been most kindly favoured with skins from several quarters of the world, more especially by the Hon. W. Elliot from India, and by the Hon. C. Murray from Persia. Many treatises in different languages have been published on pigeons, and some of them are very important, as being of considerable anti­ quity. I have associated with several eminent fanciers, and have been permitted to join two of the London Pigeon Clubs. The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing. Compare the English carrier and the short-faced tumbler, and see the wonderful difference in their beaks, entailing corresponding differences in their skulls. The carrier, more especially the male bird, is also remarkable from the wonderful development of the carunculated skin about the head, and this is accompanied by greatly elongated eyelids, very large external orifices to the nostrils, and a wide gape of mouth. The short-faced tumbler has a beak in outline almost like that of a finch ; and the common tumbler has the singular inherited habit of flying at a great height in a compact flock, and tumbling in the air head over heels. The runt is a bird of great size, with long, massive beak and large feet; some of the sub-breeds of runts have very long necks, others very long wings and tails, others singularlMj short tails. The barb is allied to the carrier,, but, instead of a very long beak, has a very short and very broad one. The pouter has a much elongated body, wings, and legs ; and its enormously developed crop, which it glories in inflating, may well excite astonishment and even laughter. The turbit has a very short and conical beak, with a line of reversed feathers down the breast; and it has the habit of con­ tinually expanding slightly the upper part of the oesophagus. The Jacobin has the feathers so much reversed along the back of the neck that they form a hood, and it has, proportionally to its size, much elongated wing and tail feathers. The trumpeter and laugher, as their names, express, utter a very different coo from the other breeds. The fantail has thirty or even forty tail feathers, instead of twelve or fourteen, the normal number in all members of the great pigeon family ; and these feathers are kept expanded, and are carried so erect that in good birds the head and tail touch ; the oil-gland is quite aborted. Several other less distinct breeds might be specified. In the skeletons of the several breeds the development of the bones of the face in length and breadth and curvature differs enormously. The shape, as well as the breadth and length of the ramus of the lower jaw, varies in a highly remarkable manner. The number of the caudal and �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION sacral vertebrae vary ; as does the number of the ribs, together with their relative breadth and the presence of processes. The size and shape of the apertures in the sternum are highly variable ; so is the degree of divergence and relative size of the two arms of the furcula. The propor­ tional width of the gape of mouth, the proportional length of the eyelids, of the orifice of the nostrils, of the tongue (not always in strict correlation with the length of beak), the size of the crop and of the upper part of the oesophagus ; the develop­ ment and abortion of the oil-gland; the number of the primary wing and caudal feathers ; the relative length of wing and tail to each other and to the body; the relative length of leg and of the feet ; the number of scutellae on the toes, the develop­ ment of skin between the toes, are all points of structure which are variable. The period at which the perfect plumage is acquired varies, as does the state of the down with which the nestling birds are clothed when hatched. The shape and size of the eggs vary. The manner of flight differs remarkably ; as does in some breeds the voice and disposition. Lastly, in certain breeds, the males and females have come to differ to a slight degree from each other. Altogether at least a score of pigeons might be chosen which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly, I think, be ranked by him as well-defined species. Moreover, I do not believe that any ornitho­ logist would place the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, pouter, and fantail in the same genus ; more especially as in each of these breeds several truly-inherited sub-breeds, or species as he might have called them, could be shown him. Great as the differences are between the breeds of pigeons, I am fully convinced that the common opinion of naturalists is correct—namely, that all have descended from the rock-pigeon (Columba livia), including under this term several geo­ graphical races or sub-species, which differ 1 from each other in the most trifling respects. As several of the reasons which have led me to this belief are in some degree appli­ cable in other cases, I will here briefly give them. If the several breeds are not varieties, and have not proceeded from the rock-pigeon, they must have descended from at least seven or eight aboriginal stocks ; for it is impossible to make the 17 present domestic breeds by the crossing of any lesser number: how, for instance, could a pouter be produced by crossing two breeds unless one of the parent-stocks possessed the characteristic enormous crop? The supposed aboriginal stocks must all have been rock-pigeons—that is, not breed­ ing or willingly perching on trees. But besides C. livia, with its geographical sub­ species, only two or three other species of rock-pigeons are known ; and these have not any of the characters of the domestic breeds. Hence the supposed aboriginal stocks must either still exist in the countries where they were originally domesticated, and yet be unknown to ornithologists (and this, considering their size, habits, and remarkable characters, seems very improbable), or they must have become extinct in the wild state. But birds breeding on precipices, and good fliers, are unlikely to be exterminated; and the common rock­ pigeon, which has the same habits with the domestic breeds, has not been exterminated even on several of the smaller British islets, or on the shores of the Mediterranean. Hence the supposed extermination of so many species having similar habits with the rock-pigeon seems to me a very rash assumption. Moreover, the several abovenamed domesticated breeds have been transported to all parts of the world, and, therefore, some of them must have been carried back again into their native country ; but not one has ever become wild or feral, though the dovecot-pigeon, which is the rock-pigeon in a very slightly altered state, has become feral in several places. Again, all recent experience shows that it is most difficult to get any wild animal to breed freely under domestication; yet, on the hypothesis of the multiple origin of our pigeons, it must be assumed that at least seven or eight species were so thoroughly domesticated in ancient times by half­ civilised man as to be quite prolific under confinement. An argument, as it seems to me, of great weight, and applicable in several other cases, is that the above-specified breeds, though agreeing generally in constitution, habits, voice, colouring, and in most parts of their structure, with the wild rock-pigeon, yet are certainly highly abnormal in other parts of their structure : we may look in vain throughout the whole great family of Columbidse for a beak like that of the English carrier, or that of the short-faced tumbler, or barb ; for reversed feathers like those of the Jacobin ; for a crop like that c ■ �18 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES of the pouter; for tail-feathers like those of the fantail. Hence it must be assumed not only that half-civilised man succeeded in thoroughly domesticating several species, but that he intentionally or by chance picked out extraordinarilyabnormal species; and, further, that these very species have since all become extinct or unknown. So many strange contingencies seem to me improbable in the highest degree. Some facts in regard to the colouring of pigeons well deserve consideration. The rock-pigeon is of a slaty-blue, and has a white rump (the Indian sub-species, C. intermedia of Strickland, having it bluish); the tail has a terminal dark bar, with the bases of the outer feathers externally edged with white; the wings have two black bars; some semi-domestic breeds and some apparently truly wild breeds have, besides the two black bars, the wings chequered with black. These several marks do not occur together in any other species of the whole family. Now, in every one of the domestic breeds, taking thoroughly well-bred birds, all the above marks, even to the white edging of the outer tail-feathers, sometimes concur per­ fectly developed. Moreover, when two birds belonging to two distinct breeds are crossed, neither of which is blue or has any of the above-specified marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt suddenly to acquire these characters; for instance I crossed some uniformly white fantails with some uniformly black barbs, and they produced mottled brown and black birds ; these I again crossed together, and one grandchild of the pure white fantail and pure black barb was of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white rump, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon ! We can under­ stand these facts, on the well-known prin­ ciple of reversion to ancestral characters, if all the domestic breeds have descended from the rock-pigeon. But if we deny this, we must make one of the two following highly improbable suppositions. Either, firstly, that all the several imagined aboriginal stocks were coloured and marked like the rock-pigeon, althoug'h no other existing species is thus coloured and marked, so that in each separate breed there might be a tendency to revert to the very same colours and markings. Or, secondly, that each breed, even the purest, has within a dozen or, at most, within a score of generations, been crossed by the rock-pigeon : I say within a dozen or | twenty generations, for we know of no fact countenancing the belief that the child ever reverts to some one ancestor, removed by a greater number of generations. In a breed which has been crossed only once with some distinct breed, the tendency to reversion to any character derived from such cross will naturally become less and less, as in each succeeding generation there will be less of the foreign blood ; but when there has been no cross with a distinct breed, and there is a tendency in both parents to revert to a character which has been lost during some former generation, this tendency, for all that we can see to the contrary, may be transmitted un­ diminished for an indefinite number of generations. These two distinct cases are often confounded in treatises on inheritance. Lastly, the hybrids or mongrels from between all the domestic breeds of pigeons are perfectly fertile. I can state this from my own observations, purposely made, on the most distinct breeds. Now, it is diffi­ cult, perhaps impossible, to bring forward one case of the hybrid offspring of two animals clearly distinct being themslves perfectly fertile. Some authors believe that long-continued domestication eliminates this strong tendency to sterility : from the history of the dog I think there is some probability in this hypothesis, if applied to species closely related together, though it is unsupported by a single experiment. But to extend the hypothecs so far as to suppose that species, aboriginally as distinct as carriers, tumblers, pouters, and fantails now are, should yield offspring perfectly fertile, inter se, seems to me rash in the extreme. From these several reasons—namely, the improbability of man having formerly got seven or eight supposed species of pigeons to breed freely under domestication ; these supposed species being quite unknown in a wild state, and their becoming nowhere feral; these species having very abnormal characters in certain respects, as compared with all other Columbidse, though so like in most other respects to the rock-pigeon ; the blue colour and various marks occa­ sionally appearing in all the breeds, both when kept pure and when crossed ; the mongrel offspring being perfectly fertile— from these several reasons, taken together, I can feel no doubt that all our domestic breeds have descended from the Columba livia with its geographical sub-species. In favour of this view, I may add, firstly, that C. livia, or the rock-pigeon, has been �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION 19 knowing well how true they bred, I felt found capable of domestication in Europe fully as much difficulty in believing that and in India ; and that it agrees in habits they could have descended from a common and in a great number of points of structure parent as any naturalist could in coming with all the domestic breeds. Secondly, to a similar conclusion in regard to the although an English carrier or short-faced many species of finches, or other large tumbler differs immensely in certain cha­ groups of birds, in nature. One circum­ racters from the rock-pigeon, yet by com­ stance has struck me much—namely, that paring the several sub-breeds of these all the breeders of the various domestic varieties, more especially those brought animals and the cultivators of plants with from distant countries, we can make an whom I have ever conversed, or whose almost perfect series between the extremes treatises I have read, are firmly convinced of structure. Thirdly, those characters that the several breeds to which each has which are mainly distinctive of each breed— attended are descended from so many for instance, the wattle and length of beak aboriginally distinct species. Ask, as I of the carrier, the shortness of that of the have asked, a celebrated raiser of Here­ tumbler, and the number of tail-feathers in ford cattle whether his, cattle might not the fantail—are in each breed eminently have descended from long-horns, and he will variable; and the explanation of this fact will be obvious when we come to treat of laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit selection. Fourthly, pigeons have been fancier who was not fully convinced that watched, and tended with the utmost care, each main breed was descended from .a and loved by many people. They have been domesticated for thousands of years distinct species. Van Mons, in his treatise in several quarters of the world; the on pears and apples, shows how utterly he earliest known record of pigeons is in the disbelieves that the several sorts, for fifth Egyptian dynasty, about 3000 B.C., as instance a Ribston-pippin or Codlin-apple, was pointed out to me by Professor Lepsius; could ever have proceeded from the seeds of the same tree. Innumerable other but Mr. Birch informs me that pigeons are given in a bill of fare in the previous examples could be given. The explanation, dynasty. In the time of the Romans, as I think, is simple : from long-continued we hear from Pliny, immense prices were study they are strongly impressed with the given for pigeons ; “ nay, they are come to differences between the several races ; and this pass, that they can reckon up their though they well know .that each race varies pedigree and race.” Pigeons were much slightly, for they win their prizes by valued by Afefe&ikKhan in India, about the selecting such slight differences, yet they year 1600 ; never less than 20,000 pigeons ignore all general arguments, and refuse to were taken with the court. “The monarchs sum up in their minds slight differences of Iran and Turan sent him some very accumulated during many successive gene ­ rare birds”; and, continues the courtly rations. May not those naturalists who, historian, “ His Majesty by crossing the knowing far less of the laws of inheritance breeds, which method was never practised than does the breeder, and knowing no before, has improved them astonishingly.” more than he does of the intermediate links About this same period the Dutch were as in the long lines of descent, yet admit that eager about pigeons as were the old many of our domestic races have descended Romans. The paramount importance of from the same parents—may they not these considerations in explaining the learn a lesson of caution when they immense amount of variation which pigeons deride the idea of species in a state of have undergone will be obvious when we nature being lineal descendants of other treat of selection. We shall then, also, species ? see how it is that the breeds so often have Selection.—Let us now briefly consider a somewhat monstrous character. It is the steps by which domestic races have also a most favourable circumstance for been produced, either from one or from the production of distinct breeds that male several allied species. Some little effect and female pigeons can be easily mated may, perhaps, be attributed to the direct for life ; and thus different breeds can be action of the external conditions of life, kept together in the same aviary. and some little to habit ; but he would be I have discussed the probable origin of a bold man who would account by such domestic pigeons at some, yet quite insuffi­ agencies for the differences of a dray- and cient, length ; because when I first kept race-horse, a greyhound and bloodhound, .pigeons and watched the several kinds, a carrier and tumbler pigeon. One of the �20 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES most remarkable features in our domesti­ cated races is that we see in them adapta­ tion, not indeed to the animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy. Some variations useful to him have probably arisen suddenly, or by one step; many botanists, for instance, believe that the fuller’s teasel, with its hooks, which cannot be rivalled by any mechanical contrivance, is only a variety of the wild Dipsacus; and this amount of change may have sud­ denly arisen in a seedling. So it has probably been with the turnspit dog ; and this is known to have been the case with the ancon sheep. But when we compare the dray-horse and race-horse, the drome­ dary and camel, the various breeds of sheep fitted either for cultivated land or mountain pasture, with the wool of one breed good for one purpose, and that of another breed for another purpose ; when we compare the many breeds of dogs, each good for man in very different ways ; when we compare the game-cock, so pertinacious in battle, with other breeds so little quarrelsome, with “everlasting layers” which never desire to sit, and with the bantam so small and elegant; when we compare the host of agricultural, culinary, orchard, and flowergarden races of plants, most useful to man at different seasons and for different purposes, or so beautiful in his eyes, we must, I think, look further than to mere variability. We cannot suppose that all the breeds were suddenly produced as perfect and as useful as we now see them; indeed, in several cases, we know that this has not been their history. The key is man’s power of accumulative selection : nature gives successive variations ; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him. In this sense he may be said to make for himself useful breeds. The great power of this principle of selection is not hypothetical. It is certain that several of our eminent breeders have, even within a single, lifetime, modified to a large extent some breeds of cattle and sheep. In order fully to realise what they have done, it is almost necessary to read several of the many treatises devoted to this subject, and to inspect the animals. Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organisation as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please. If I had space, I could quote numerous passages to this effect from highly competent authorities. Youatt, who was probably better acquainted with the works of agriculturists than almost any other in­ dividual, and who was himself a very good judge of an animal, speaks of the principle of selection as “that which enables the agriculturist, not only to modify the char­ acter of his flock, but to change it altogether. It is the magician’s wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.” Lord Somer­ ville, speaking of what breeders have done for sheep, says : “It would seem as if they had chalked out upon a wall a form perfect in itself, and then had given it existence.” That most skilful breeder, Sir John Sebright, used to say, with respect to pigeons, that “ he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak.” In Saxony the importance of the principle of selection in regard to merino sheep is so fully recognised that men follow it as a trade : the sheep are placed on a table and are studied, like a picture by a connoisseur; this is done three times at intervals of months, and the sheep are each time marked and classed, so that the very best may ultimately be selected for breeding. What English breeders have actually effected is proved by the enormous prices given for animals with a good pedigree ; and these have now been exported to almost every quarter of the world. The improvement is by no means generally due to crossing different breeds; all the best breeders are strongly opposed to this practice, except sometimes among closely allied sub-breeds. And when a cross has been made, the closest selection is far more indispensable even than in ordinary cases. If selection consisted merely in separating some very distinct variety, and breedingfrom it, the principle would be so obvious as hardly to be worth notice ; but its impor­ tance consists in the great effect produced by the accumulation in one direction, during successive generations, of differences abso­ lutely inappreciable by an uneducated eye —differences which I for one have vainly attempted to appreciate. Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judg­ ment sufficient to become an eminent breeder. If gifted with these qualities, and he studies his subject for years, and devoteshis lifetime to it with indomitable perse­ verance, he will succeed, and may make great improvements ; if he wants any of these qualities, he will assuredly fail. Few would readily believe in the natural capacity and years of practice requisite to become even a skilful pigeon-fancier. The same principles are followed by �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION horticulturists ; but the variations are here often more abrupt. No one supposes that out choicest productions have been pro­ duced by a single variation from the aboriginal stock. We have proofs that this is not so in some cases, in which exact records have been kept; thus, to give a very trifling instance, the steadily-increas­ ing size of the common gooseberry may be quoted. We see an astonishing improve­ ment in many florists’ flowers, when the flowers of the present day are compared with drawings made only twenty or thirty years ago. When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the “ rogues,” as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard. With animals this kind of selection is, in fact, also followed; for hardly anyone is so careless as to allow his worst animals to breed. In regard to plants, there is another means of observing the accumulated effects of selection—namely, by comparing the diversity of flowers in the different varieties of the same species in the flower-garden ; the diversity of leaves, pods, or tubers, or whatever part is valued, in the kitchen­ garden, in comparison with the flowers of the same varieties ; and the diversity of fruit of the same species in the orchard, in comparison with the leaves and flowers of the same set of varieties. See how different the leaves of the cabbage are, and how extremely alike the flowers ; how unlike the flowers of the heartsease are, and how alike the leaves ; how much the fruit of the different kinds of gooseberries differ in size, colour, shape, and hairiness, and yet the flowers present very slight differences. It is not that the varieties which differ largely in some one point do not differ at all in other points ; this is hardly ever, perhaps never, the case. The laws of correlation of growth, the importance of which should never be overlooked, will ensure some differences; but, as a general rule, I cannot doubt that the continued selection of slight variations, either in the leaves, the flowers, or the fruit, will produce races differing from each other chiefly in these characters. It may be objected that the principle of selection has been reduced to methodical practice for scarcely more than threequarters of a century; it has certainly been more attended to of late years, and many treatises have been published on the subject; and the result has been, in a 21 corresponding degree, rapid and important. But it is very far from true that the prin­ ciple is a modern discovery. I could give several references to the full acknowledg­ ment of the importance of the principle in works of high antiquity. In rude and barbarous periods of English history choice animals were often imported, and laws were passed to prevent their exportation : the destruction of horses under a certain size was ordered, and this maybe compared to the “ rogumg ” of plants by nurserymen. The principle of selection I find distinctly given in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia. Explicit rules are laid down by some of the Roman classical writers. From passages in Genesis, it is clear that the colour of domestic animals was at that early period attended to. Savages now sometimes cross their dogs with wild canine animals, to improve the breed, and they formerly did so, as is attested by passages in Pliny. The savages in South Africa match their draught cattle by colour, as do some of the Esquimaux their teams of dogs. Living­ stone shows how much good domestic breeds are valued by the negroes of the interior of Africa who have not associated with Europeans. Some of these facts do not show actual selection, but they show that the breeding of domestic animals was carefully attended to in ancient times, and is now attended to by the lowest savages. It would, indeed, have been a strange fact had attention not been paid to breeding, for the inheritance of good and bad qualities is so obvious. At the present time eminent breeders try by methodical selection, with a distinct object in view, to make a new strain or sub-breed superior to anything existing in the country. But, for our purpose, a kind of Selection, which may be called Uncon­ scious, and which results from everyone trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expecta­ tion of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt that this pro­ cess, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed, in the same way as Bakewell, Collins, etc., by this very same process, only carried on more metho­ dically, did greatly modify, even during their own lifetimes, the forms and qualities of their cattle. Slow and insensible changes of this kind could never be recognised �ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES unless actual measurements or careful drawings of the breeds in question had been made long ago, which might serve for comparison. In some cases, however, unchanged, or but little changed individuals of the same breed may be found in less civilised districts, where the breed has been less improved. There is reason to believe that King Charles’s spaniel has been unconsciously modified to a large extent since the time of that monarch. Some highly competent authorities are convinced that the setter is directly derived from the spaniel, and has probably been slowly altered from it. It is known that the English pointer has been greatly changed within the last century, and in this case the change has, it is believed, been chiefly effected by crosses with the fox-hound; but what concerns us is that the change has been effected unconsciously and gradually, and yet so effectually, that, though the old Spanish pointer certainly came from Spain, Mr. Borrow has not seen, as I am informed by him, any native dog in Spain like our pointer. By a similar process of selection, and by careful training, the whole body of English race-horses have come to surpass in fleetness and size the parent Arab stock, so that the latter, by the regulations for the Goodwood Races, are favoured in the weights they carry. Lord Spencer and others have shown how the cattle of England have increased in weight and in early maturity compared with the stock formerly kept in this country. By comparing the accounts given in old pigeon treatises of carriers and tumblers with these breeds as now existing in Britain, India, and Persia, we can, I think, clearly trace the stages through which they have insensibly passed, and come to differ so greatly from the rock-pigeon. Youatt gives an excellent illustration of the effects of a course of selection, which may be considered as unconsciously fol­ lowed, in so far that the breeders could never have expected or even have wished to have produced the result which ensued —namely, the production of two distinct strains. The two flocks of Leicester sheep kept by Mr. Buckley and Mr. Burgess, as Mr. Youatt remarks, “have been purely bred from the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for upwards of fifty years. There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with the subject that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell’s flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties.” If there exist savages so barbarous as never to think of the inherited character of the offspring of their domestic animals, yet any one animal particularly useful to them, for any special purpose, would be' carefully preserved during famines and other accidents, to which savages are so liable, and such choice animals would thus generally leave more offspring than- the inferior ones ; so that in this case there would be a kind of unconscious selection going on. We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs. In plants the same gradual process of improvement, through the occasional pre­ servation of the best individuals, whether or not sufficiently distinct to be ranked at their first appearance as distinct varieties, and whether or not two or more species or races have become blended together by crossing, may plainly be recognised in the increased size and beauty which we now see in the varieties of the heartsease, rose, pelargonium, dahlia, and other plants, when compared with the older varieties or with their parent-stocks. No one would ever expect to get a first-rate heartsease or dahlia from the seed of a wild plant. No one would expect to raise a first-rate melting pear from the seed of the wild pear, though he might succeed from a poor seedling growing wild if it had come from a garden­ stock. The pear, though cultivated in classical times, appears, from Pliny’s description, to have been a fruit of very inferior quality. I have seen great surprise expressed in horticultural works at the wonderful skill of gardeners in having produced such splendid results from such poor materials; but the art, I cannot doubt, has been simple, and, as far as the final result is concerned, has been followed almost unconsciously. It has consisted in always cultivating the best known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly better variety has chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards. But . the gardeners of the classical period, who culti­ vated the best pear they could procure, never thought what splendid fruit we should eat; though we owe our excellent fruit, in some small degree, to their having naturally �VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION chosen and preserved the best varieties they could anywhere find. A large amount of change in our culti­ vated plants, thus slowly and unconsciously accumulated, explains, as I believe, the well-known fact that in a vast number of cases we cannot recognise, and therefore do not know, the wild parent-stocks of the plants which have been longest cultivated in our flower and kitchen gardens. If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we cah understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture. It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by Continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that given to the plants in countries anciently civilised. In regard to the domestic animals kept by uncivilised man, it should not be over­ looked that they almost always have to struggle for their own food, at least during certain seasons. And in two countries, very differently circumstanced, individuals of the same species, having slightly different constitutions or structure, would often succeed better in the one country than in the other; and thus by a process of “natural selection,” as will hereafter be more fully explained, two sub-breeds might be formed. This, perhaps, partly explains what has been remarked by some authors—namely, that the varieties kept by savages have more of the character of species than the varieties kept in civilised countries. On the view here given of the allimportant part which selection by man has played, it becomes at once obvious how it is that our domestic races show adaptation in their structure or in their habits to man’s wants or fancies. We can, I think, further understand the frequently abnormal char­ acter of our domestic races, and likewise their differences being so great in external characters and relatively so slight in in­ ternal parts or organs. Man can hardly select, or only with much difficulty, any deviation of structure excepting such as is externally visible ; and indeed he rarely cares for what is internal. He can never act by selection, excepting on variations which are first given to him in some slight degree by nature. No man would ever try 23 to make a fantail till he saw a pigeon with a tail developed in some slight degree in an unusual manner, or a pouter till he saw a pigeon with a crop of somewhat unusual size ; and the more abnormal or unusual any character was when it first appeared, the more likely it would be to catch his attention. But to use such an expression as trying to make a fantail, is, I have no doubt, in most cases, utterly incorrect. The man who first selected a pigeon with a slightly larger tail never dreamed what the descendants of that pigeon would become through long-continued, partly unconscious and partly methodical selection. Perhaps the parent bird of all fantails had only fourteen tail-feathers somewhat expanded, like the present Java fantail, or like indi­ viduals of other and distinct breeds, in which as many as seventeen tail-feathers have been counted. Perhaps the first pouter-pigeon did not inflate its crop much more than the turbit now does the upper part of its oesophagus—a habit which is disregarded by all fanciers, as it is not one of the points of the breed. Nor let it be thought that some great deviation of structure would be necessary to catch the fancier’s eye : he perceives extremely small differences, and it is in human nature to value any novelty, how­ ever slight, in one’s own possession. Nor must the value which would formerly be set on any slight differences in the individuals of the same species be judged of by the value which would now be set on them, after several breeds have once fairly been established. Many slight differences might, and indeed do now, arise among pigeons, which are rejected as faults or deviations from the standard of perfection of each breed. The common goose has not given rise to any marked varieties ; hence the Thoulouse and the common breed, which differ only in colour, that most fleeting of characters, have lately been exhibited as distinct at our poultry shows. I think these views further explain what has sometimes been noticed—namely, that we know nothing about the origin or history of any of our domestic breeds. But, in fact, a breed, like a dialect of a language, can hardly be said to have had a definite origin. A man preserves and breeds from an individual with some slight deviation of structure, or takes more care than usual in matching his best animals and thus improves them, and the improved individuals slowly spread in the immediate neighbourhood. But as yet they will hardly �24 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES have a distinct name, and, from being only slightly valued, their history will be dis­ regarded. When further improved by the same slow and gradual process, they will spread more widely, and will get recognised as something distinct’and valuable, and will then probably first receive a provincial name. In semi-civilised countries, with little free communication, the spreading and knowledge of any new sub-breed will be a slow process. As soon as the points of value of the new sub-breed are once fully acknowledged the principle, as I have called, it, of unconscious selection will always tend, perhaps more at one period than at another, as the breed rises or falls in fashion—perhaps more in one district than in another, according to the state of civilisation of the inhabitants—slowly to add to the characteristic features of the breed, whatever they may be. But the chance will be infinitely small of any record having been preserved of such slow, varying, and insensible changes. . 1 must now say a few words on the circumstances, favourable or the reverse, to man’s power of selection. A high degree of variability is obviously favourable, as freely giving the materials for selection to work on ; not that mere individual differences are not amply sufficient, with extreme care, to allow of the accumula­ tion of a large amount of modification in almost any desired direction. But as variations manifestly useful or pleasing to man appear only occasionally, the chance of their appearance will be much increased by a large number of individuals being kept; and hence this comes to be of the highest importance to success. On this principle Marshall has remarked, with respect to the sheep of parts of Yorkshire, that “as they generally belong to poor people, and are mostly in small lots, they never can be improved.” On the other hand, nurserymen, from raising large stocks of the same plants, are generally far more successful than amateurs in getting new and valuable varieties. The keeping of a large number of individuals of a species in any country requires that the species should be placed under favourable condi­ tions of life, so as to breed freely in that country. When the individuals of any species are scanty, all the individuals, what­ ever their quality may be, will generally be allowed to breed, and this will effectually prevent selection. But probably the most important point of all is, that the animal or plant should be so highly useful to ' man, or so much valued by him, that the closest attention should be paid to even the slightest deviation in the qualities or structure of each individual. Unless such attention be paid, nothing can be effected. I have seen it gravely remarked that it was most fortunate that the strawberry began to vary just when gardeners began to attend closely to this plant. No doubt the strawberry had always varied since it was cultivated, but the slight varieties had been neglected. As soon, however, as gardeners picked out individual plants with slightly larger, earlier, or better fruit, and raised seedlings from them, and again picked out the best seedlings and bred from them, then there appeared (aided by some crossing with distinct species) those many admirable varieties of the strawberry which have been raised during the last thirty or forty years. In the case of animals with separate sexes, facility in preventing crosses is an important element of success in the formation of new7 races, at least in a country which is already stocked with other races. In this respect enclosure of the land plays a part. Wandering savages or the inhabitants of open plains rarely possess more than one breed of the same species. Pigeons can be mated for life, and this is a great con­ venience to the fancier, for thus many races may be kept true, though mingled in the same aviary ; and this circumstance must have largely favoured the improvement and formation of new breeds. Pigeons, I may add, can be propagated in great numbers and at a very quick rate, and inferior birds may be freely rejected, as when killed they serve for food. On the other hand, cats, from their nocturnal rambling habits, cannot be matched, and, although so much valued by women and children, we hardly ever see a distinct breed kept up ; such breeds as we do sometimes see are almost always imported from some other country, often from islands. Although I do not doubt that some domestic animals vary less than others, yet the rarity or absence of distinct breeds of the cat, the donkey, peacock, goose, etc., may be attributed in main part to selection not having been brought into play : in cats, from the diffi­ culty in pairing them ; in donkeys, from only a few being kept by poor people, and little attention paid to their breeding ; in peacocks, from not being very easily reared and a large stock not kept ; in geese, from being valuable only for two purposes, food and feathers, and more �VARIATION UNDER NATURE especially from no pleasure having been felt in the display of distinct breeds. To sum up on the origin of our Domestic Races of animals and plants. I believe that the conditions of life, from their action on the reproductive system, are so far of the highest importance as causing varia\ bility. I do not believe that variability is an inherent and necessary contingency, under all circumstances, with all organic beings, as some authors have thought. The effects of variability are modified by various degrees of inheritance and of reversion. Variability is governed by many unknown laws, more especially by that of correlation of growth. Something may be attributed to the direct action of the con­ ditions of life. Something must be attri­ buted to use and disuse. The final result is thus rendered infinitely complex. In some cases I do not doubt that the inter­ crossing of species, aboriginally distinct, has played an important part in the origin of our domestic productions. When in 25 any country several domestic breeds have once been established, their occasional inter-crossing, with the aid of selection, has, no doubt, largely aided in the formation of new sub-breeds ; but the importance of the crossing of varieties has, I believe, been greatly exaggerated, both in regard to animals and to those plants which are propagated by seed. In plants which are temporarily propagated by cuttings, buds, etc., the importance of the crossing both of distinct species and of varieties is immense; for the cultivator here quite disregards the extreme variability both of hybrids and mongrels, and the frequent sterility of hybrids ; but the cases of plants not propagated by seed are of little impor­ tance to us, for their endurance is only temporary. Over all these causes of Change I am convinced that the accumula­ tive action of Selection, whether applied methodically and more quickly, or uncon­ sciously and more slowly, but more efficiently, is by far the predominant Power. Chapter II. VARIATION UNDER NATURE \ ariability — Individual differences -— Doubtful species—Wide ranging, much diffused, and common species vary most—Species of the larger genera in any country vary more than the species of the smaller genera—Many of the species of the larger genera resemble varieties in being very closely, but unequally, related to each other, and in having restricted ranges. Before applying the principles arrived at in the last chapter to organic beings in a state of nature, we must briefly discuss whether these latter are subject to any variation. To treat this subject at all properly, a long catalogue of dry facts should be given ; but these I shall reserve for my future work. Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given - of the term species. No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species. Generally the term includes the unknown element of a distinct act of creation. The term “ variety ” is almost equally difficult to define ; but here community of descent is almost universally implied, though it can rarely be proved. We have also what are called monstrosities; but they graduate into varieties. By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure in one part, either injurious to or not useful to the species, and not generally propagated. Some authors use the term “variation” in a technical sense, as imply­ ing a modification directly due to the physical conditions of life; and “varia­ tions” in this sense are supposed not to be inherited ; but who can say that the dwarfed condition of shells in the brackish waters of the Baltic, or dwarfed plants on Alpine summits, or the thicker fur of an animal from far northwards, would not in some cases be inherited for at least some few generations ? and in this case I presume that the form would be called a variety. �26 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES vidual differences which seems to me Again, we have many slight differences extremely perplexing: I refer to those which may be called individual differences, genera which have sometimes been called such as are known frequently to appear in “ protean ” or “ polymorphic,” in which the the offspring from the same parents, or species present an inordinate amount of which may be presumed to have thus variation ; and hardly twq naturalists can arisen, from being frequently observed _ in agree which forms to rank as species and the individuals of the same species in­ which as varieties. We may instance habiting the same confined locality. No Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium among plants, one supposes that all the individuals of the several genera of insects, and several same species are cast in the very same genera of Brachiopod shells. In most mould. These individual differences are polymorphic genera some of the species highly important for us, as they afford have fixed and definite characters. Genera materials for natural selection to accumu­ which are polymorphic in one country late, in the ‘same manner as man can seem to be, with some few exceptions, accumulate in any given direction indi­ polymorphic in other countries, and like­ vidual differences in his domesticated wise, judging from Brachiopod shells, at productions. These individual differences former periods of time. These facts seem generally affect what naturalists consider to be very perplexing, for they seem to unimportant parts ; but I could show by a show that this kind of variability is inde­ long catalogue of facts that parts which pendent of the conditions of life. I am must be called important, whether viewed inclined to suspect that we see in these under a physiological or classificatory point polymorphic genera variations in points of of view, sometimes vary in the individuals structure which are of no service or dis­ of the same species. I am convinced that service to the species, and which conse­ the most experienced naturalist would be quently have not been seized on and surprised at the number of the cases of rendered definite by natural selection, as variability, even in important parts of hereafter will be explained. structure, which he could collect on good Those forms which possess in some con­ authority, as I have collected, during a siderable degree the character of species, course of years. It should be remembered but which are so closely similar to some that systematists are far from pleased at other forms, or are so closely linked to finding variability in important characters, them by intermediate gradations that and that there are not many men who will naturalists do not like to rank them as laboriously examine internal and important distinct species, are in several respects the organs, and compare them in many speci­ most important for us. We have every mens of the same species. I should never reason to believe that many of these have expected that the branching of the main doubtful and closely-allied forms have per­ nerves close to the great central ganglion manently retained their characters in their of an insect would have been variable in own country for a long time—for as long, the same species ; I should have expected as far as we know, as have good and true that changes of this nature could have been species. Practically, when a naturalist effected only by slow degrees ; yet quite can unite two forms together by others recently Mr. Lubbock has shown a degree of having intermediate characters, he treats variability in these main nerves in Coccus, the one as a variety of the other, ranking which may almost be compared to the the most common, but sometimes the one irregular branching of the stem of a tree. first described, as the species and the This philosophical naturalist, I may add, has also quite recently shown that the j other as the variety. But cases of great difficulty, which I will not here enumerate, muscles in the larvae of certain insects are sometimes occur in deciding whether or very far from uniform. Authors sometimes not to rank one form as a variety of another, argue in a circle when they state that even when they are closely connected by important organs never vary ; for these intermediate links ; nor will the commonlysame authors practically rank that character assumed hybrid nature of the intermediate as important (as some few naturalists have links always remove the difficulty. In very honestly confessed) which does not vary; many cases, however, one form is ranked and, under this point of view, no instance as a variety of another, not because the of an important part varying will ever be intermediate links have actually been found, found ; but under any other point of view but because analogy leads the observer to many instances assuredly can be given. suppose either that they do now somewhere There is one point connected with indi­ �VARIATION UNDER NATURE exist, or may formerly have existed ; and here a wide door for the entry of doubt and conjecture is opened. Hence, in determining whether a form should be ranked as a species or a variety, the opinion of naturalists having sound judgment and wide experience seems the only guide to follow. We must, however, in many cases decide by a majority of naturalists, for few well-marked and wellknown varieties can be named which have not been ranked as species by at least some competent judges. That varieties of this doubtful nature are far from uncommon cannot be dis­ puted. Compare the several floras of Great Britain, of France, or of the United States, drawn up by different botanists, and see what a surprising number of forms have been ranked by one botanist as good species and by another as mere varieties. Mr. H. C. Watson, to whom I lie under deep obligation for assistance of all kinds, has marked for me ,182 British plants, which are generally considered as varieties, but which have all been ranked by botanists as species ; and in making this list he has omitted many trifling varieties, but which nevertheless have been ranked by some botanists as species, and he has entirely omitted several highly polymorphic genera. Under genera, in­ cluding the most polymorphic forms, Mr. Babington gives 251 species, whereas Mr. Bentham gives only 112—a difference of 139 doubtful forms 1 Among animals which unite for each birth, and which are highly locomotive, doubtful forms, ranked by one zoologist as a species and by another as a variety, can rarely be found within the same country, but are common in separated areas. How many of those birds and insects in North America and Europe which differ very slightly from each other have been ranked by one eminent naturalist as undoubted species, and by another as varieties, or, as they are often called, as geographical races ! Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, both one with another and with those from the American mainland, I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties. On the islets of the little Madeira group there are many insects which are characterised as varieties in Mr. Wollaston’s admirable work, but which it cannot be doubted would be ranked as distinct species by many entomologists. Even Ireland has a few animals, nowgenerally regarded as varieties, but which have been ranked as species by some zoologists. Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species peculiar to Great Britain. A wide distance between the homes of two doubtful forms leads many naturalists to rank both as distinct species ; but what distance, it has been well asked, willsuffice ? If that between America and Europe is ample, will that between the Continent and the Azores, or Madeira, or the Canaries, or Ireland, be sufficient? It must be admitted that many forms considered by highly-competent judges as varieties have so perfectly the character of species that they are ranked by other highly-competent judges as good and true species. But to discuss whether they are rightly called species or varieties, before any definition of these terms has been generally accepted, is vainly to beat the air. Many of the cases of strongly-marked varieties or doubtful species well deserve consideration ; for several interesting lines of argument, from geographical distribu­ tion, analogical variation, hybridism, etc., have been brought to bear on the attempt to determine their rank. I will here give only a single instance—the well-known one of the primrose and cowslip, or Primula vulgaris and veris. These plants differ considerably in appearance ; they have a different flavour, and emit a different odour; they flower at slightly different periods ; they grow in somewhat different stations ; they ascend mountains to different heights ; they have different geographical ranges ; and, lastly, according to very numerous experiments made during several years by that most careful observer Gartner, they can be crossed only with much difficulty. We could hardly wish for better evidence of the two forms being specifically distinct. On the other hand, they are united by many intermediate links, and it is very doubtful whether these links are hybrids ; and there is, as it seems to me, an overwhelming amount of experimental evidence showing that they descend from common parents, and consequently must be ranked as varieties. Close investigation, in most cases, will bring naturalists to an agreement how to rank doubtful forms. Yet it must be con­ fessed that it is in the best-known countries �28 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES that we find the greatest number of forms of doubtful value. I have been struck with the fact that, if any animal or plant in a state of nature be highly useful to man, or from any cause closely attract his attention, varieties of it will almost universally be found recorded. These varieties, moreover, will be often ranked by some authors as species. Look at the common oak, how closely it has been studied ; yet a German author makes more than a dozen species out of forms which are very generally con­ sidered as varieties ; and in this country the highest botanical authorities and practical men can be quoted to show that the sessile and pedunculated oaks are either good and distinct species or mere varieties. When a young naturalist commences the study of a group of organisms quite unknown to him, he is at first much per­ plexed to determine what differences to consider as specific and what as varieties ; for he knows nothing of the amount and kind of variation to which the group is subject; and this shows, at least, how very generally there is some variation. But if he confine his attention to one class within one country, he will soon make up his mind how to rank most of the doubtful forms. His general tendency will be to make many species, for he will become impressed, just like the pigeon or poultry fancier before alluded to, with the amount of difference in the forms which he is continually studying ; and he has little general knowledge of analogical variation in other groups and in other countries by which to correct his first impressions. As he extends the range of his observations, he will meet with more cases of difficulty ; for he will encounter a greater number of closely-allied forms. But if his observations be widely extended, he will in the end generally be enabled to make up his own mind which to call varieties and which species ; but he will succeed in this at the expense of admitting much variation—and the truth of this ad­ mission will often be disputed by other naturalists. When, moreover, he comes to study allied forms brought from countries not now continuous, in which case he can hardly hope to find the intermediate links between his doubtful forms, he will have to trust almost entirely to analogy, and his difficulties rise to a climax. Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and sub-species—that is, the forms which in the opinion of some naturalists come very near to, but do not quite arrive at, the rank of species ; or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series ; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage. Hence I look at individual differences, though of small interest to the systematist, as of high importance for us, as being the first step towards such slight varieties as are barely thought worth recording in works on natural history. And I look at varieties which are in any degree more distinct and permanent, as steps leading to more strongly marked and more permanent varieties ; and at these latter as leading to sub-species, and to species. The passage from one stage of difference to another and higher stage may be, in some cases, due merely to the long-continued action of different physical conditions in two different regions ; but I have not much faith in this view ; and I attribute the passage of a variety, from a state in which it differs very slightly from its parent to one in which it differs more, to the action of natural selection in accumulating (as will here­ after be more fully explained) differences of structure in certain definite directions. Hence I believe a well-marked variety may be called an incipient species ; but whether this belief be justifiable must be judged of by the general weight of the several facts and views given throughout this work. It need not be supposed that all varieties or incipient species necessarily attain the rank of species. They may while in this incipient state become extinct, or they may endure as varieties for very long periods, as has been shown to be the case by Mr. Wollaston with the varieties of certain fossil land-shells in Madeira. If a variety were to flourish so as to exceed in numbers the parent species, it would then rank as the species, and the species as the variety; or it might come to supplant and ex­ terminate the parent species; or both might co-exist, and both rank as indepen­ dent species. But we shall hereafter have to return to this subject. From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given -to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also �VARIATION UNDER NATURE applied arbitrarily, and for mere con­ venience’ sake. Guided by theoretical considerations, I thought that some interesting results might be obtained in regard to the nature and relations of the species which vary most, by tabulating all the varieties in several well-worked floras. At first this seemed a simple task; but Mr. H. C. Watson, to whom I am much indebted for valuable advice and assistance on this subject, soon convinced me that there were many diffi­ culties, as did subsequently Dr. Hooker, even in stronger terms. I shall reserve for my future work the discussion of these difficulties, and the tables themselves of the proportional numbers of the varying species. Dr. Hooker permits me to add that, after having carefully read my manu­ script and examined the tables, he thinks that the following statements are fairly well established. The whole subject, however, treated as it necessarily here is with much brevity, is rather perplexing, and allusions cannot be avoided to the “ struggle for existence,” “divergence of character,” and other questions, hereaftei- to be discussed. Alph. de Candolle and others have shown that plants which have very wide ranges generally present varieties ; and this might have been expected, as they become exposed to diverse physical conditions, and as they come into competition (which, as we shall hereafter see, is a far more important circumstance) with different sets of organic beings. But my tables further show that, in any limited country, the species which are most common—that is, abound most in individuals, and the species which are most widely diffused within their own country (and this is a different consideration from wide range, and to a certain extent from commonness)—often give rise to varieties sufficiently well marked to have been recorded in botanical works. Hence it is the most flourishing, or, as they may be called, the dominant species—those which range widely over the world, are the most diffused in their own country, and are the most . numerous in individuals—which oftenest produce well-marked varieties, or, as I consider them, incipient species. And this, perhaps, might have been anticipated ; for, as varieties, in order to become in any degree permanent, necessarily have to struggle with the other inhabitants of the country, the species which are already dominant will be the most likely to yield offspring, which, though in some slight degree modified, still inherit those advan­ 29 tages that enabled their parents to become dominant over their compatriots. If the plants inhabiting a country and described in any Flora be divided into two equal masses, all those in the larger genera being placed on one side, and all those in the smaller genera on the other side, a somewhat larger number of the very common and much diffused or dominant species will be fouud on the side of the larger genera. This, again, might have been anticipated; for the mere fact of many species of the same genus inhabiting any country shows that there is something in the organic or inorganic conditions of that country favourable to the genus ; and, consequently, we might have expected to have found in the larger genera, or those including many species, a large proportional number of dominant species. ’ But so many causes tend to obscure this result that I am surprised that my tables show even a small majority on the side of the larger genera. I will here allude to only two causes of obscurity. Fresh-water and salt-loving plants have generally very wide ranges and are much diffused, but this seems to be connected with the nature of the stations inhabited by them, and has little or no relation to the size of the genera to which the species belong. Again, plants low in the scale of organisation are generally much more widely diffused than plants higher in the scale ; and here again there is no close relation to the size of the genera. The cause of lowly-organised plants ranging widely will be discussed in our chapter on geographical distribution. From looking at species as only stronglymarked and well-defined varieties, I was led to anticipate that the species of the larger ger.era in each country would oftener present varieties than the species of the smaller genera ; for wherever many closelyrelated species (z.<?., species of the same genus) have been formed, many varieties or incipient species ought, as a general rule, to be now forming. Where many large trees grow we expect to find saplings. Where many species of a genus have been formed through variation, circumstances have been favourable for variation ; and hence we might expect that the circum­ stances would generally be still favourable to variation. On the other hand, if we look at each species as a special act of creation, there is no apparent reason why more varieties should occur in a group having many species than in one having few. �3° ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES To test the truth of this anticipation I have arranged the plants of twelve countries, and the coleopterous insects of two districts, into two nearly equal masses, the species of the larger genera on one side, and those of the smaller genera on the other side, and it has invariably proved to be the case that a larger proportion of the species on the side of the larger genera present varieties than on the side of the smaller genera. Moreover, the species of the large genera which present any varieties invariably present a larger average number of varieties than do the species of the small genera. Both these results follow when another division is made, and when all the smallest genera, with from only one to four. species, are absolutely excluded from the tables. These facts are of plain significa­ tion on the view that species are only strongly-marked and permanent varieties ; for wherever many species of the same genus have been formed, or where, if we may use the expression, the manufactory of species has been active, we ought gene­ rally to find the manufactory still in action, more especially as we have every reason to believe the process of manufacturing new species to be a slow one. And this certainly is the case, if varieties be looked at as incipient species; for my tables clearly show as a general rule that, wherever many species of a genus have been formed, the species of that genus present a number of varieties, that is of incipient species beyond the average. It is not that all large genera are now varying much, and are thus increasing in the number of their species, or that no small genera are now varying and increasing ; for if this had been so, it would have been fatal to my theory ; inasmuch as geology plainly tells us that small genera have in the lapse of time often increased greatly in size; and that large genera have often come to their maxima, declined, and disappeared. All that we want to show is, that where many species of a genus have been formed, on an average many are still forming ; and this holds good. There are other relations between the species of large genera and their recorded varieties which deserve notice. We have seen that there is no infallible criterion by which to distinguish species and wellmarked varieties ; and in those cases in which intermediate links have not been found between doubtful forms naturalists are compelled to come to a determination by the amount of difference between them, judging by analogy whether or not the amount suffices to raise one or both to the rank of species. Hence the amount of difference is one very important criterion in settling whether two forms should be ranked as species or varieties. Now Fries has remarked in regard to plants, and Westwood in regard to insects, that in large genera the amount of difference between the species is often exceedingly small. I have endeavoured to test this numerically by averages, and, as far as my imperfect results go, they confirm the view. I have also consulted some sagacious and experienced observers, and, after delibera­ tion, they concur in this view. In this respect, therefore, the species of the larger genera resemble varieties, more than do the species of the smaller genera. Or the case may be put in another way, and it may be said that in the larger genera, in which a number of varieties or incipient species greater than the average are now manu­ facturing, many of the species already manufactured still to a certain extent resemble varieties, for they differ from each other by a less than usual amount of difference. Moreover, the species of the large genera are related to each other, in the same manner as the varieties of any one species are related to each other. No naturalist pretends that all the species of a genus are equally distinct from each other ; they may generally be divided into sub-genera, or sections, or lesser groups. As-Fries has well remarked, little groups of species are generally clustered like satellites around certain other species. And what are varie­ ties but groups of forms, unequally related to each other, and clustered round certain forms—that is, round their parent-species ? Undoubtedly there is one most important point of difference between varieties and species — namely, that the amount of difference between varieties, when com­ pared with each other or with their parent­ species, is much less than that between the species of the same genus. But when we come to discuss the principle, as I call it, of Divergence of Character, we shall see how this may be explained, and how the lesser differences between varieties will tend to increase into the greater differences between species. There is one other point which seems to me worth notice. Varieties generally have much restricted ranges : this statement is indeed scarcely more than a truism, for if a variety were found to have a wider range �VARIATION UNDER NATURE than that of its supposed parent-species their denominations ought to be reversed. But there is also reason to believe that those species which are very closely allied to other species, and in so far resemble varieties, often have much-restricted ranges. For instance, Mr. H. C. Watson has marked for me in the well-sifted London Catalogue of plants (4th edition) 63 plants which are therein ranked as species, but which he considers as so closely allied to other species as to be of doubtful value : these 63 reputed species range on an average over 6.9 of the provinces into which Mr. Watson has divided Great Britain. Now, in this same catalogue, 53 acknowledged varieties are recorded, and these range over 7.7 provinces ; whereas, the species to which these varieties belong range over 14.3 provinces. So that the acknowledged varieties have very nearly the same restricted average range as have those very closely allied forms marked for me by Mr. Watson as doubtful species, but which are almost universally ranked by British botanists as good and true species. Finally, then, varieties have the same general characters as species, for they can­ not be distinguished from species—except, firstly, by the discovery of intermediate linking forms ; and the occurrence of such links cannot affect the actual characters of the forms which they connect; and except, secondly, by a certain amount of difference, for two forms, if differing very little, are generally ranked as varieties, notwith­ 3i standing that intermediate linking forms have not been discovered; but the amount of difference considered necessary to give to two forms the rank of species is quite indefinite. In genera having more than the average number of species in any country, the species of these genera have more than the average number of varieties. In large genera the species are apt to be closely but unequally allied together, forming little clusters round certain species. Species very closely allied to other species apparently have restricted ranges. In all these several respects the species of large genera present a strong analogy with varieties. And we can clearly understand these analogies, if species have once existed as varieties, and have thus originated; whereas these analogies are utterly in­ explicable if each species has been inde­ pendently created. We have also seen that it is the most flourishing or dominant species of the larger genera which on an average vary most; and varieties, as we shall hereafter see, tend to become converted into new and distinct species. The larger genera thus tend to become larger; and throughout nature the forms of life which are now dominant tend to become still more dominant by leaving many modified and dominant descendants. But, by steps hereafter to be explained, the larger genera also tend to break up into smaller genera. And thus the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups sub­ ordinate to groups. Chapter III. STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE Bears on natural selection—The term used in a wide sense—Geometrical powers of increase— Rapid increase of naturalised animals and plants—Nature of the checks to increase— Competition universal—Effects of climate— Protection from the number of individuals— Complex relations of all animals and plants throughout nature—Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species ; often severe between species of the same genus—The relation of organism to organism the most important of all rela­ tions. Before entering on the subject of this chapter I must make a few preliminary remarks, to show how the struggle for existence bears on Natural Selection. It has been seen in the last chapter that �32 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES among organic beings in a state of nature there is some individual variability; indeed, I am not aware that this has ever been disputed. It is immaterial for us whether a multitude of doubtful forms be called species or sub-species or varieties ; what rank, for instance, the two or three hundred doubtful forms of British plants are entitled to hold, if the existence of any well-marked varieties be admitted. But the mere exist­ ence of individual variability and of some few well-marked varieties, though necessary as the foundation for the work, helps us but little in understanding how species arise in nature. How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been per­ fected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe ; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird ; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze ; in short, we see beautiful adaptations every­ where and in every part of the organic world. # Again, it may be asked, how is it that varieties, which I have called incipient species, become ultimately converted into good and distinct species, which in most cases obviously differ from each other far more than do the varieties of the same species ? How do those groups of species, which constitute what are called distinct genera, and which differ from each other more than do the species of the same genus, arise ? All these results, as we shall more fully see in the next chapter, follow from the struggle for life. Owing' to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight, a.ndfrom whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an indi­ vidual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many indi­ viduals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selec­ tion. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts as the works of Nature are to those of Art. We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence. In my future work this subject shall be treated, as it well deserves, at much greater length. The elder de Candolle and Lyell have largely and philosophically shown that all organic beings are exposed to severe com­ petition. In regard to plants, no one has treated this subject with more spirit and ability than W. Herbert, Dean of Man­ chester, evidently the result of his great horticultural knowledge. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult —at least, I have found it so—than con­ stantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet, unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of Nature bright with gladness ; we often see superabundance of food ; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey ; we do not always bear in mind that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year. I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and meta­ phorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be de­ pendent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which on an average only one comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The �STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 33 mistletoe is dependent on the apple and a minimum rate of natural increase : it will few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched be under the mark to assume that it breeds sense be said to struggle with these trees, when thirty years old, and goes on breeding for, if too many of these parasites grow on till ninety years old, bringing forth three the same tree, it will languish and die. pair of young in this interval: if this be But several seedling mistletoes, growing so, at the end of the fifth century there close together on the same branch, may would be alive fifteen million elephants, more truly be said to struggle with each descended from the first pair. other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by But we have better evidence on this birds, its existence depends on birds ; and subject than mere theoretical calculations it may metaphorically be said to struggle —namely, the numerous recorded cases of with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to the astonishingly rapid increase of various tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate animals in a state of nature, when circum­ its seeds rather than those of other stances have been favourable to them plants. In these several senses, which during two or three following seasons. pass into each other, I use for convenience’ Still more striking is the evidence from sake the general term of struggle for exist­ our domestic animals of many kinds which ence. have run wild in several parts of the world : A strugglefor existence inevitably follows if the statements of the rate of increase of from the high rate at which all organic slow-breeding cattle and horses in South beings tend to increase. Every being America, and latterly in Australia, had not which during its natural lifetime produces been well authenticated, they would have several eggs or seeds must suffer destruc­ been incredible. So it is with plants: tion during some period of its life, and cases could be given of introduced plants during some season or occasional year ; which have become common throughout otherwise, on the principle of geometrical __ whole islands in a period of less than ten increase, its numbers would quickly become years. Several of the plants, such as the so inordinately great that no country could cardoon and a tall thistle, now most support the product. Hence, as more indi­ numerous over the wide plains of La Plata, viduals are produced than can possibly clothing square leagues of surface almost survive, there must in every case be a to the exclusion of all other plants, have struggle for existence, either one individual been introduced from Europe ; and there with another of the same species, or with are plants which now range in India, as I the individuals of distinct species, or with hear from Dr. Falconer, from Cape Comorin the physical conditions of life. It is the to the Himalaya, which have been imported doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold from America since its discovery. In such force to the whole animal and vegetable cases, and endless instances could be given, kingdoms ; for in this case there can be no one supposes that the fertility of these no artificial increase of food and no pru­ animals or plants has been suddenly and dential restraint from marriage. Although temporarily-increased in any sensible degree. some species may be now increasing, more The obvious explanation is that the con­ or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do ditions of life have been very favourable, so, for the world would not hold them. and that there has consequently been less There is no exception to the rule that destruction of the old and young, and that every organic being naturally increases at nearly all the young have been enabled to so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the breed. In such cases the geometrical ratio earth would soon be covered by the progeny of increase, the result of which never fails of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man to be surprising, simply explains the extra­ has doubled in twenty-five years ; and at ordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion this rate, in a few thousand years, there of naturalised productions in their new would literally not be standing room for homes. his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that In a state of nature almost every'- plant if an annual plant produced only two seeds produces seed, and among animals there and there is no plant so unproductive as are very few which do not annually pair. this—and their seedlings next year pro­ Hence we may confidently assert that all duced two, and so on, then in twenty years plants and animals are tending to increase there would be a million plants. The at a geometrical ratio, that all would most elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder rapidly stock every station in which they of all known animals, and I have taken could anyhow exist, and that the geometrical some pains to estimate its probable tendency to increase must be checked by D • �34 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES destruction at some period of life. Our number of the species will almost instan­ familiarity with the larger domestic animals taneously increase to any amount. tends, I think, to mislead us : we see no The causes which check the natural ten­ great destruction falling on them, and dency of each species to increase in number we forget that thousands are annually are most obscure. Look at the most slaughtered for food, and that in a state vigorous species : by as much as it swarms of nature an equal number would have in numbers, by so much will its tendency somehow to be disposed of. to increase be still further increased. We The only difference between organisms know not exactly what the checks are in which annually produce eggs or seeds by even one single instance. Nor will this the thousand and those which produce surprise anyone who reflects how ignorant extremely few is, that the slow breeders we are on "this head, even in regard to would require a few more years to people, mankind, so incomparably better known under favourable conditions, a w-hole dis­ than any other animal. This subject has trict, let it be ever so large. The condor been ably treated by several authors, and lays a couple of eggs and the ostrich a I shall, in my future work, discuss some of score, and yet in the same country the the checks at considerable length, more condor may be the more numerous of the especially in regard to the feral animals of two : the Fulmar petrel lays but one egg, South America. Here I will make only yet it is believed to be the most numerous a few remarks, just to recall to the reader’s bird in the world. One fly deposits hundreds mind some of the chief points. Eggs or of eggs, and another, like the hippobosca, very young animals seem generally to suffer a single one ; but this difference does not most; but this is not invariably the case. With plants there is a vast destruction of determine how many individuals of the two seeds; but, from some observations which species can be supported in a district. A large number of eggs is of some importance . I have made, I believe that it is the seed­ to those species which"depend on a rapidly lings which suffer most from germinating in ground already thickly stocked with fluctuating amount of food, for it allows other plants. Seedlings, also, are destroyed them rapidly to increase in number. But in vast numbers by various enemies ; for the real importance of a large number of eggs or seeds is to make up for much instance, on a piece of ground three feet long and two wide, dug and cleared, and destruction at some period of Life; and this where there could be no choking from other period in the great majority of cases is an plants, I marked all the seedlings of our early one. If an animal can in any way native weeds as they came up, and out of protect its own eggs or young, a small the 357 no less than 295 were destroyed, number may be produced, and yet the chiefly by slugs and insects. If turf which average stock be fully kept up; but if many has long been mown—and the case would eggs or young are destroyed, many must be the same with turf closely browsed by be produced, or the species will become quadrupeds—be let to grow, the more extinct. It wrould suffice to-keep up the vigorous plants gradually kill the less full number of a tree, which lived on an vigorous, though fully grown, plants ; thus average for a thousand years, if a single out of twenty species growing on a little seed were produced once in a thousand plot of turf (three feet by four) nine species years, supposing that this seed were never perished from the other species being destroyed, and could be ensured to ger­ allowed to grow up freely. minate in a fitting place. So that in all The amount of food for each species of cases the average number of any animal course gives the extreme limit to which or plant depends only indirectly on the each can increase ; but very frequently it is number of its eggs or seeds. not the obtaining food, but the serving as In looking at Nature, it is most necessary prey to other animals, which determines to keep the foregoing considerations always the average numbers of a species. Thus in mind—never to forget that every single there seems to be little doubt that the stock organic being around us may be said to of partridges, grouse, and hares on any be striving to the utmost to increase in large estate depends chiefly on the destruc­ numbers ; that each lives by a struggle at tion of vermin. If not one head of game some period of its life ; that heavy destruc­ were shot during the next twenty years in tion inevitably falls-either on the young or England, and, at the same time, if no old during each generation or at recurrent vermin were destroyed, there would, in all intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate probability, be less game than at present, the destruction ever so little, and the �STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE although hundreds of thousands of game animals are now annually killed. On the other hand, in some cases, as with the elephant and rhinoceros, none are destroyed by beasts of prey : even the tiger in India most rarely dares to attack a young elephant protected by its dam. Climate plays an important part in deter­ mining the average numbers of a species, and periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought I believe to be the most effective of all checks. I estimated that the winter of 1854-55 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds ; and this is a tremen­ dous destruction, when we remember that ten per cent, is an extraordinarily severe mortality from epidemics with man. The action of climate seems at first sight to be quite independent of the struggle for exis­ tence ; but, in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals, whether of the same or of distinct species, which subsist on the same kind of food. Even when climate, for instance extreme cold, acts directly, it will be the least vigorous, or those which have got least food through the advancing winter, which will suffer most. When we travel from south to north, or from a damp region to a dry, we invariably see some species gradually getting rarer and rarer, and finally disap­ pearing ; and the change of climate being conspicuous, we are tempted to attribute the whole effect to its direct action. But this is a false view : we forget that each species, even where it most abounds, is constantly suffering enormous destruction at some period of its life, from enemies or from competitors for the same place and food ; and if these enemies or competitors be in the least degree favoured by any slight change of climate, they will increase in numbers, and, as each area is already fully stocked with inhabitants, the other species will decrease. When we travel southward and see a species decreasing in numbers, we may feel sure that the cause lies quite as much in other species being favoured as in this one being hurt. So it is when we travel northward, but in a some­ what lesser degree, for the number of species of all kinds, and therefore of com­ petitors, decreases northwards ; hence in going northward, or in ascending a moun­ tain, we far oftener meet with stunted forms, due to the directly injurious action of climate, than we do in proceeding south­ wards or in descending a mountain. When we reach the Arctic regions,or snow-capped 35 summits, or absolute deserts, the struggle for life is almost exclusively with the elements. That climate acts in main part indirectly by favouring other species we may clearly see in the prodigious number of plants in our gardens which can perfectly well endure our climate, but which never become naturalised, for they cannot compete with our native plants nor resist destruction by our native animals. When a species, owing to highly favour­ able circumstances, increases inordinately in numbers in a small tract, epidemics—at least, this seems generally to occur with our game animals—often ensue ; arid here we have a limiting check independent of the struggle for life. But even some of these so-called epidemics appear'to be due to parasitic worms, which have frbrn some cause, possibly in part through facility of diffusion among the crowded animals, been di sproportionably favoured : and here comes in a sort of struggle between the parasite and its prey. On the other hand, in many cases a. large stock of individuals of the same species, relatively to the numbers of its . enemies, is absolutely necessary for its pre­ servation. Thus we can easily raise plenty of corn and rape-seed, etc., in dur fields,, because the seeds are in great excess compared with the number of birds which feed on them ; nor can the birds,- though having a superabundance of food at thisone season, increase in number propor-' tionally to the supply of seed, as their numbers are checked during winder; but anyone who has tried knbws how trouble­ some it is to get seed from a few wheat or other such plants in a garden : I have in this case lost every single seed. This view of the necessity of a large stock of the same species for its preservation explains, I believe, some singular facts in nature, such as that of very rare plants being sometimes extremely abundant in the few spots where they do occur; and that of some social plarits being social, that is, abounding in individuals, even on the extreme confines of their range. For in such cases we may believe that a plant could exist only where the conditions of its life were so favourable that many could . exist together, and thus save the species from utter destruction. I should add that the good effects of frequent intercrossing, and the ill effects of close interbreeding, probably come into play in some of these cases ; but on this intricate subject I will not here enlarge. ■ ■ ■- . �36 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings which have to struggle together in the same country. I will give only a single instance, which, though a simple one, has interested me. In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation, where I had ample means of inves­ tigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man ; but several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable, more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another : not only the pro­ portional numbers of the heath-plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants ■ (not counting grasses and carices) flourished in the plantations, which could not be found on the heath. The effect on the insects must have been still greater, for six insec­ tivorous birds were very common in the plantations, which were not to be seen on the heath ; and the heath was frequented by two or three distinct insectivorous birds. Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed, so that cattle could not enter. But how important an element enclosure is I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hill-tops : within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown firs are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. When I ascertained that these young trees had not been sown or planted, I was so much surprised at their numbers that I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted clumps. But, on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings and little trees, which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard, at a point some hundred yards distant from one of the old clumps, I counted thirty-two little trees ; and one of them, with twenty-six rings of growth, had during many years tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed. No wonder that, as soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with vigorously growing young firs. Yet the heath was so extremely barren and so extensive that no one would ever have imagined that cattle would have so t closely and effectually searched it for food. Here we see that cattle absolutely deter­ mine the existence of the Scotch fir ; but in several parts of the world insects deter­ mine the existence of cattle. Perhaps Paraguay offers the most curious instance of this ; for here neither cattle nor horses nor dogs have ever run wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral state ; and Azara and Rengger have shown that this is caused by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these animals when first born. The increase of these flies, numerous as they are, must be habitually checked by some means, probably by birds. Hence, if certain insectivorous birds (whose numbers are probably regulated by hawks or beasts of prey) were to increase in Paraguay, the flies would decrease—then cattle and horses would become feral, and this would certainly greatly alter (as, indeed, I have observed in parts of South America) the vegetation : this again would largely affect the insects ; and this, as we just have seen in Staffordshire, the insectivorous birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity. We began this series by insectivorous birds, and we have ended with them. Not that in nature the rela­ tions can ever be as simple as this. Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success ; and yet in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time, though assuredly the merest trifle would often give the victory to one organic being over another. Never­ theless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being ; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life ! I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations. I shall hereafter have occasion to show that the exotic Lobelia fulgens, in this part of England, is never visited by insects, and, consequently, from its peculiar struc­ ture, never can set a seed. Many of our orchidaceous plants absolutely require the �STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE visits of moths to remove their pollen­ masses, and thus to fertilise them. I have also reason to believe that humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do not visit this flower. From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt that, if the whole genus of humblebees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly dis­ appear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests ; and Mr. H. New­ man, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that “ more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England.” Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as everyone knows, on the number of cats ; and Mr. Newman says: “Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal m large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district! In the case of every species, many different checks, acting at different periods of .life, and during different seasons or years, probably come into play ; some one check or some few being generally the most potent, but all concur in determining the average number or even the existence of the species. In some cases it can be shown that widely-different checks act on the same species in different districts. When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this ! Every one has heard that, when an American forest is cut down, a very different vegetation springs up ; but it has been observed that ancient Indian ruins in the Southern United States, which must formerly have been cleared of trees, now display the same beautiful diversity and proportion of kinds as in the sur­ rounding virgin forests. What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here 37 have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand ; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase and all feeding on each other or on the trees or theiP seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees ! Throw up a handful of feathers, and all must fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins! The dependency of one organic being on another, as of a parasite on its prey, lies generally between beings remote in the scale of nature. This is often the case with those which may strictly be said to struggle with each other for existence, as in the case of locusts and grass-feeding quadrupeds. But the struggle almost invariably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are ex­ posed to the same dangers. In the case of varieties of the same species, the struggle will generally be almost equally severe, and we sometimes see the contest soon decided : for instance, if several varieties of wheat be sown together, and the mixed seed be resown, some of the varieties which best suit the soil or climate, or are naturally the most fertile, will beat the others and so yield more seed, and will consequently in a. few years quite supplant the other varieties. To keep up a mixed stock of even such extremely close varieties as the variously coloured sweet-peas, they must be each year harvested separately, and the seed then mixed in due proportion, otherwise the weaker kinds will steadily decrease in numbers and disappear. So again with the varieties of sheep : it has been asserted that certain mountain-varieties will starve out other mountain-varieties, so that they cannot be kept together. The same result has followed from keeping together different varieties of the medicinal leech. It may even be doubted whether the varieties of any one of our domestic plants or animals have so exactly the same strength, habits, and constitution, that the original proportions of a mixed stock could be kept up for half-adozen generations, if they were allowed to struggle together, like beings in a state of �38 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES nature, and if the seed or young were not annually sorted. As species of the same genus have usually, though by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally more severe between species ■of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between .species of distinct genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missel­ thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How fre­ quently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates 1 In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. One species :of charlock will supplant another, and so in ■ other .cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we pre­ cisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life. : A corollary of the highest importance may be deduced from the foregoing remarks—namely, that the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings with which it comes, into competition for food or resi­ dence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger ; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger’s body. But in the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the elements of air and water. Yet the advan­ tage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relation to the land being already thickly clothed by other plants ; so that the seeds may be widely distributed and fall on unoccupied ground. In the water-beetle, the structure of its legs, so well adapted for diving, allows it to com­ pete with other aquatic insects, to hunt for its own prey, and to escape serving as prey to other animals. The store of nutriment laid up within the seeds of many plants seems at first sight to have no sort of relation to other plants. But from the strong growth of young plants produced from such seeds (as peas and beans), when sown in the midst of long grass, I suspect that the chief use of the nutriment in the seed is to favour the growth of the young seedling while struggling with other plants ■ growing' vigorously all around. Look at a plant in the midst of its range ; why does it not double or quadruple its numbers ? We know that it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier, districts. In this case we can clearly see that, if we wished in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in number, we should have to give it some advantage over its competitors, or over the animals which preyed on it. On the con­ fines of its geographical range, a change of constitution with respect to climate would clearly be an advantage to our plant; but we have reason to believe that only a few plants or animals range so far that they are destroyed by the rigour of the climate alone. Not until we reach the extreme confines of life, in the Arctic regions or on the borders of an utter desert, will com­ petition cease. The land maybe extremely cold or dry, yet there will be competition between some few species, or between the individuals of the same species, for the warmest or dampest spots. Hence, also, we can see that when a plant or animal is placed in a new country among new competitors, though the climate may be exactly the same as in its former home, yet the conditions of its life will generally be changed in an essential manner. If we wished to increase its average numbers in its new home, we should have to modify it in a different way to what we should have done in its native country ; for we should have to give it some advantage over a different set of com­ petitors or enemies. It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form some advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do so as to succeed. It will convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings ; a conviction as necessary as it seems to be difficult to acquire. All that we can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation �NATURAL SELECTION or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature "*< 1 » ■ 39 is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. Chapter IV. NATURAL SELECTION Natural Selection—its power compared with man’s selection—its power on characters of trifling importance—its power at all ages and on both sexes—Sexual Selection—On the -> generality of intercrosses between individuals of the same species—Circumstances favour- • able and unfavourable to Natural Selection, namely, intercrossing, isolation, number of individuals—Slow action—Extinction caused by Natural Selection—Divergence of Char­ acter, related to the diversity of inhabitants of any small area, and to naturalisation—Action of Natural Selection, through Divergence of Character and Extinction, on the descendants from a common parent—Explains the Group: ing of all organic beings. HOW will the struggle for existence, dis­ cussed too briefly in the last chapter, act in regard to variation ? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of. strange peculiarities our domestic produc­ tions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of genera­ tions ? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however, slight, over others would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind. On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations I call Natural Selection. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in the species called polymorphic. We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The pro­ portional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this, also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single intro­ duced tree or mammal has been shown to be. But in the case of an island, or of a country partly surrounded by barriers, into which new and better adapted forms could not freely enter, we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up, if some of the original inhabitants were in some manner modified ; for, had the area been open to immigration, these same places would have been seized on by intruders. In such case every slight modification �4° ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES which in the course of ages chanced to arise, and which in any way favoured the individuals of any of the species by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved ; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement. We have reason to believe, as stated in the first chapter, that a change in the con­ ditions of life, by specially acting on the reproductive system, causes or increases variability; and in the foregoing case the conditions of life are supposed to have undergone a change, and this would manifestly be favourable to natural selec­ tion by giving a better chance of profitable variations occurring ; and, unless profitable variations do occur, natural selection can do nothing. Not that, as I believe, any extreme amount of variability is necessary ; as man can certainly produce great results by adding up in any given direction mere individual differences, so could Nature, but far more easily, from having incomparably longer time at her disposal. Nor do I believe that any great physical change, as of climate, or any unusual degree of isolation to check immigration, is actually necessary to produce new and unoccupied places for natural selection to fill up by modifying and improving some of the varying inhabitants. For, as all the inhabitants of each country are struggling together with nicely-balanced forces, ex­ tremely slight modifications in the structure or habits of one inhabitant would often give it an advantage over others; and still further modifications of the same kind would often still further increase the advantage. No country can be named in which all the native inhabitants are now so perfectly adapted to each other, and to the physical conditions under which they live, that none of them could anyhow be improved ; for in all countries the natives have been so far conquered by naturalised productions that they have allowed foreigners to take firm possession of the land. And, as foreigners have thus every­ where beaten some of the natives, we may safely conclude that the natives might have been modified with advantage, so as to have better resisted such intruders. As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect ? Man can act only on external and visible characters : Nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good ; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life. Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country ; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner ; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food ; he does not exercise a longbacked or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not . rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some halfmonstrous form ; or at least by some modi­ fication prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him. Under Nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicelybalanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the ■ wishes and efforts of man ! how short his time ! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumu­ lated by Nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far “truer ” in character than man’s productions ; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship ? It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest ; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever oppor­ tunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were. Although natural selection can act only through and for the good of each being, yet characters and structures, which we �NATURAL SELECTION are apt to consider as of very trifling importance, may thus be acted on. When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark­ feeders mottled-grey, the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red-grouse the colour of heather, and the black-grouse that of peaty earth, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger. Grouse, if not destroyed at some period of their lives, would increase in countless numbers ; they are known to suffer largely from birds of prey ; and hawks are guided by eyesight to their prey—so much so, that on parts of the Continent persons are warned not to keep white pigeons, as being the most liable to destruction. Hence I can see- no reason to doubt that natural selection might be most effective in giving the proper colour to each kind of grouse, and in keeping that colour, when once acquired, true and constant. Nor ought we to think that the occasional destruction of an animal of any particular colour would produce little effect: we should remember how essential it is in a flock of white sheep to destroy every lamb with the faintest trace of black. In plants the down on the fruit and the colour of the flesh are con­ sidered by botanists as characters of the most trifling importance ; yet we hear from an excellent horticulturist, Downing, that in the United States smooth-skinned fruits suffer far more from a beetle, a curculio, than those with down ; that purple plums suffer far more from a certain disease than yellow plums; whereas another disease attacks yellow-fleshed peaches far more than those with other coloured flesh. If, with all the aids of art, these slight differ­ ences make a great difference in cultivating the several varieties, assuredly in a state of nature, where the trees would have to struggle with other trees and with a host of enemies, such differences would effec­ tually settle which variety, whether a smooth or downy, a yellow or purple-fleshed fruit, should succeed. In looking at many small points of difference between species, which, as far as our ignorance permits us to judge, seem quite unimportant, we must not forget that climate, food, etc., probably produce some slight and direct effect. It is, however, far more necessary to bear in mind that there are many unknown laws of correlation of growth, which, when one part of the organi­ sation is modified through variation, and the modifications are accumulated by natural selection for the good of the being, 4i will cause other modifications, often of the most unexpected nature. As we see that those variations which under domestication appear at any parti­ cular period of life, tend to reappear in the offspring at the same period—for instance, in the seeds of the many varieties of our culinary and agricultural plants; in the caterpillar and cocoon stages of the varieties of the silkworm ; in the eggs of poultry, and in the colour of the down of their chickens ; in the horns of our sheep and cattle when nearly adult—so, in a state of nature, natural selection will be enabled to act on and modify organic beings at any age by the accumulation of variations profitable at that age, and by their inheri­ tance at a corresponding age. If it profit a plant to have its seeds more and more widely disseminated by the wind, I can see no greater difficulty in this being effected through natural selection than in the cotton-planter increasing and improving by selection the down in the pods on his cotton-trees. Natural selection may modify and adapt the larva of an insect to a score of contingencies wholly different from those which concern the mature insect. These modifications will no doubt affect, through the laws of correlation, the struc­ ture of the adult; and probably in the case of those insects which live only for a few hours, and which never feed, a large part of their structure is merely the correlated result of successive changes in the structure of their larvae. So, conversely, modifica­ tions in the adult will probably often affect the structure of the larva ; but in all cases natural selection will ensure that modifica­ tions consequent on other modifications at a different period of life shall not be in the least degree injurious ; for, if they became so, they would cause the extinction of the species. Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community ; if each in consequence profits by the selected change. What natural selection cannot do is to modify the struc­ ture of one species without giving it any advantage for the good of another species; and, though statements to this effect may be found in works of natural history, I cannot find one case which will bear inves­ tigation. A structure used only once in an animal’s whole life, if of high importance to it, might be modified to any extent by �42 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES natural selection ; for instance, the great jaws possessed by certain insects, used exclusively for opening the cocoon—or the hard tip to the beak of nestling birds, used for breaking the egg. It has been asserted that of the best short-beaked tumbler­ pigeons more perish in the egg than are able to get out of it; so that fanciers assist in the act of hatching. Now, if nature had to make the beak of a full-grown pigeon very short for the bird’s own advantage, the process of modification would be very slow, and there would be simultaneously the most rigorous selection of the young birds within the egg which had the most powerful and hardest beaks, for all with weak beaks would inevitably perish ; or more delicate and more easily broken shells might be selected, the thickness of the shell being known to vary like every other structure. Sexual Selection.—Inasmuch as pecu­ liarities often appear under domestication in one sex and become hereditarily attached to that sex, the same fact probably occurs under nature, and, if so, natural selection will be able to modify one sex in its func­ tional relations to the other sex, or in relation to wholly different habits of life in the two sexes, as is sometimes the case with insects. And this leads me to say a few words on what I call Sexual Selection. This depends, not on a struggle for exis­ tence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females ; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. Generally, the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny. But in many cases victory depends not on general vigour, but on having special weapons confined to the male sex. A hornless stag or spurless cock would have a poor chance of leaving offspring. Sexual selection, by always allowing the victor to breed, might surely give indomitable courage, length to the spur, and strength to the wing to strike in the spurred leg, as well as the brutal Cock-fighter, who knows well that he can improve his breed by care­ ful selection of the best cocks. How low in the scale of nature the law of battle descends I know not; male alligators have been described as fighting, bellowing, and whirling round, like Indians, in a war­ dance, for the possession of the females ; male salmons have been seen fighting all day long; male stag-beetles often bear wounds from the huge mandibles of other males. The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons. The males of carnivorous animals are already well armed ; though to them and to others special means of defence may be given through means of sexual selection, as the mane to the lion, the shoulder-pad to the boar, and the hooked jaw to the male salmon ; for the shield may be as important for victory as the sword or spear. Among birds the contest is often of a more peaceful character. All those who have attended to the subject believe that there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species to attract by singing the females. The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of paradise, and some others, congre­ gate ; and successive males display their gorgeous plumage and perform strange antics before the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner. Those who have closely attended to birds in confinement well know that they often take individual preferences and dislikes : thus Sir R. Heron has described how one pied peacock was eminently attractive to all his hen birds. It may appear childish to attribute any effect to such apparently weak means : I cannot here enter on the details necessary to support thjs view ; but if man can in a short time give elegant carriage and beauty to his bantams, according to his standard of beauty, I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melo­ dious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect. I strongly suspect that some well-known laws, with respect to the plumage of male and female birds, in com­ parison with the plumage of the young, can be explained on the view of plumage having been chiefly modified by sexual selection, acting when the birds have come to the breeding age or during the breeding season ; the modifications thus produced being inherited at corresponding ages or seasons, either by the males alone or by the males and females ; but I have not space here to enter on this subject. Thus it is, as I believe, that when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or- ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by �NATURAL SELECTION sexual selection; that is, individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defence, or charms ; and have transmitted these advantages to their male offspring. Yet I would not wish to attribute all such sexual differences to this agency ; for we see peculiarities arising and becoming attached to the male sex in our domestic animals (as the wattle in male carriers, horn-like protuberances in the cocks of certain fowls, etc.), which we cannot believe to be either useful to the males in battle or attractive to the females. We see analogous cases under nature—for . instance, the tuft of hair on the breast of the turkey-cock, which can hardly be either useful or ornamental to this bird ; indeed, had the tuft appeared under domestication, it would have been called a monstrosity. Illustrations of the Action of Natural Selection.—In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations. Let us take the case of a wolf, which preys on various animals, securing some by craft, some by strength, and some by fleetness ; and let us suppose that the fleetest prey—a deer for instance, had from any change in the country increased in numbers, or that other prey had decreased in numbers,' during that season of the year when the wolf is hardest pressed for food. I canmnder such circumstances see no reason to doubt that the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the best chance of surviving, and so be preserved or selected—provided always that they retained strength to master their prey at this or at some other period of the year, when they might be compelled to prey on other animals. I can see no more reason to doubt this than that man can improve the fleetness of his greyhounds by careful and methodical selection, or by that unconscious selection which results from each man trying to keep the best dogs without any thought of modifying the breed. Even without any change in the pro­ portional numbers of the animals on which our wolf preyed, a cub might be born with an innate tendency to pursue certain kinds of prey. Nor can this be thought very improbable ; for we often observe great differences in the natural tendencies of our domestic animals ; one cat, for instance, taking to catch rats, another mice ; one cat, according to Mr. St. John, bringing 43 home winged game, another hares ofl rabbits, and another hunting on marshy ground and almost nightly catching wood­ cocks or snipes. The tendency to catch rats rather than1 mice is known to be inherited. Now, if any slight innate change of habit or of structure benefited an individual wolf, it would have the best chance of surviving and of leaving offspring. Some of its young would probably inherit the same habits or structure, and by the repetition of this process a new variety might be formed which would either supplant or co-exist with the parent form of wolf. Or, again, the wolves inhabiting a mountainous district, and those frequenting the lowlands, would naturally be forced to hunt different prey ; and from the continued preservation of the individuals best fitted for the two sites two varieties might slowly be formed. These varieties would cross and blend where they met ; but to this subject of intercrossing we shall soon have to return. I may add that, according to Mr. Pierce, there are two varieties of the wolf inhabiting the Catskill Mountains in the United States—one with a light greyhound-like form, which pursues deer, and the other more bulky, with shorter legs, which more frequently attacks the shepherd’s flocks. Let us now take a more complex case. Certain plants excrete a sweet juice, appa­ rently for the sake of eliminating something injurious from their sap : this is effected by glands at the base of the stipules in some Leguminoste, and at the back of the leaf of the common laurel. This juice, though small in quantity, is greedily sought by insects. Let us now suppose a little sweet juice or nectar to be excreted by the inner bases of the petals of a flower. In this case insects in seeking the nectar would get dusted with pollen, and would certainly often transport the pollen from one flower to the stigma of another flower. The flowers of two distinct individuals of the same species would thus get crossed ; and the act of crossing, we have good reason to believe (as will hereafter be more fully alluded to), would produce very vigorous seedlings, which consequently would have the best chance of flourishing and surviving. Some of these seedlings would probably inherit the nectar-excreting power. Those individual flowers which had the largest glands dr nectaries, and which excreted most nectar, would be oftenest visited by insects, and would be oftenest crossed ; and so in the long run would gain the upper hand. Those flowers, �44 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES also, which had their stamens and pistils placed, in relation to the size and habits of the particular insects which visited them, so as to favour in any degree the transportal of their pollen from flower to flower, would likewise be favoured or selected. We might have taken the case of insects visiting i flowers for the sake of collecting pollen instead of nectar ; and as pollen is formed for the sole object of fertilisation, its destruc­ tion appears a simple loss to the plant ; yet if a little pollen were carried, at first occasionally and then habitually, by the pollen-devouring insects from flower to flower, and a cross thus effected, although nine-tenths of the pollen were destroyed, it might still be a great gain to the plant; .and those individuals which produced more .and more pollen, and had larger and larger j| .anthers, would be selected. When our plant, by this process of the -•continued preservation or natural selection of more and more attractive flowers, had been rendered highly attractive to insects, they would, unintentionally on their part, regularly carry pollen from flower to flower; and that they can most effectually do this I could easily show by many striking .instances. I will give only one—-not as a very striking case, but as likewise illus­ trating one step in the separation of the sexes of plants, presently to be alluded to. Some holly-trees bear only male flowers, which have four stamens producing a rather small quantity of pollen, and a rudimentary pistil; other holly-trees bear only female flowers ; these have a full-sized pistil, and four stamens with shrivelled anthers, in which not a grain of pollen can be detected. Having found a female tree exactly sixty yards from a male tree, I put the stigmas ■of twenty flowers, taken from different branches, under the microscope, and on all, without exception, there were pollen­ grains, and on some a profusion of pollen. As the wind had set for several days from the female to the male tree, the pollen could not thus have been carried. The weather had been cold and boisterous, and, therefore, not favourable to bees ; neverthe­ less, every female flower which I examined had been effectually fertilised by the bees, accidentally dusted with pollen, having flown from tree to tree in search of nectar. But to return to our imaginary case : as soon as the plant had been rendered so highly attractive to insects that pollen was regularly carried from flower to flower, another process might commence. No, naturalist doubts the advantage of what has been called the “ physiological division of labour”; hence we may believe that it would be advantageous to a plant to pro­ duce stamens alone in one flower or on one whole plant, and pistils alone in another flower or on another plant. In plants under culture and placed under new conditions of life, sometimes the male organs and some­ times the female organs become more or less impotent: now, if we suppose this to occur in ever so slight a degree under nature, then, as pollen is already carried regularly from flower to flower, and as a more complete separation of the sexes of our plant would be advantageous on the principle of the division of labour, indi­ viduals with this tendency more and more increased would be continually favoured or selected, until at last a complete separation of the sexes would be effected. Let us now turn to the nectar-feeding insects in our imaginary case: we may suppose the plant of which we have been slowly increasing the nectar by continued selection to be a common plant, and that certain insects depended in main parton its nectar for food. I could give many facts, showing how anxious bees are to save time ; for instance, their habit of cutting holes and sucking the nectar at the bases of certain flowers, which they can, with a very little more trouble, enter by the mouth. Bearing such facts in mind, I can see no reason to doubt that an accidental deviation in the size and form of the body, or in the'curvature and length of the proboscis, etc., far too slight to be appre­ ciated by us, might profit a bee or other insect, so that an individual so characterised would be able to obtain its food more quickly, and so have a better chance of living and leaving descendants. Its descendants would probably inherit a tendency to a similar slight deviation of structure. The tubes of the corollas of the common red and incarnate clovers (Trifolium pratense and incarnatum) do not on a hasty glance appear to differ in length ; yet the hive-bee can easily suck the nectar out of the incarnate clover, but not out of the common red clover, which is visited by humble-bees alone ; so that whole fields of the red clover offer in vain an abundant supply of precious nectar to the hive-bee. Thus it might be a great advantage to the hive-bee to have a slightly longer or differently constructed proboscis. On the other hand, I have found by experi| ment that the fertility of clover depends on i bees visiting and moving parts of the �NATURAL SELECTION corolla, so as to push the pollen on to the stigmatic surface. Henc£, again, if humblebees were to become rare in any country, it might be a great advantage to the red clover to have a shorter or more deeply divided tube to its corol^so that the hive­ bee could visit its flowers. Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure. I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection, exemplified in the above imaginary instances, is open to the same objections which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell’s noble views on “ the modern changes of the earth, as illustrative of geology”; but we now seldom hear the action, for instance, of the coast-waves, called a trifling and insignificant cause, when applied to the excavation of gigantic valleys or to the formation of the longest lines of inland cliffs. Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumula­ tion of infinitesimally small inherited modi­ fications, each profitable to the preserved being ; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure. On the Intercrossing of Individuals.—I must here introduce a short digression. In the case of animals and plants with separated sexes, it is of course obvious that two individuals must always (with the exception of the curious and not wellunderstood cases of parthenogenesis) unite for each birth ; but in the case of hermaph­ rodites this is far from obvious. Neverthe­ less, I am strongly inclined to believe that with all hermaphrodites two individuals, either occasionally or habitually, concur for the reproduction of their kind. This view was first suggested by Andrew Knight. We shall presently see its importance ; but I must here treat the subject with extreme brevity, though I have the materials pre­ pared for an ample discussion. All verte­ brate animals, all insects, and some other large groups of animals, pair for each birth. Modern research has much diminished the number of supposed hermaphrodites, and 45 of real hermaphrodites a large number pair; that is, two individuals regularly unite for reproduction, which is all that concerns us. But still there are many hermaphrodite animals which certainly do not habitually pair, and a vast majority of plants arc hermaphrodites. What reason, it may be asked, is there for supposing in these cases that two individuals ever concur in repro­ duction ? As it is impossible here to enter on details, I must trust to some general considerations alone. In the first place, I have collected so large a body of facts, showing, in ac­ cordance with the almost universal belief of breeders, that with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring ; and, on the other hand, that close interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility ; that these facts alone incline me to believe that it is a general law of nature (utterly ignorant though we be of the meaning of the law) that no organic being self-fertilises itself for an eternity of gene­ rations ; but that a cross with another indi­ vidual is occasionally—perhaps at very long intervals—indispensable. On the belief that this is a law of nature, we can, I think, understand several large classes of facts, such as the following, which on any other view are inexplicable. Every hybridiser knows how unfavourable exposure to wet is to the fertilisation of a flower, yet what a multitude of flowershave their anthers and stigmas fully exposed to the weather ! But if an occasional cross be indispensable, the fullest freedom for the entrance of pollen from another individual will explain this state of exposure, more especially as the plant’s own anthers and pistil generally stand so close together that self-fertilisation seems almost inevitable. Many flowers, on the other hand, have their organs of fructification closely en­ closed, as in the great papilionaceous or pea-family ; but in several, perhaps in all, such flowers there is a very curious adapta­ tion between the structure of the flower and the manner in which bees suck the nectar; for, in doing this, they either push the flower’s own pollen on the stigma or bring pollen from another flower. So necessary are the visits of bees to papilionaceous flowers that I have found, by experiments published elsewhere, that their fertility is greatly diminished if these visits be pre­ vented. Now, it is scarcely possible that bees should fly from flower to flower, and �46 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES not carry pollen from one to the other, to the pollen and stig’matic surface of the the great good, as I believe, of the plant. same flower, thqygh placed so close Bees will act like a camel-hair pencil, and together, as if for tne very purpose of self­ it is quite sufficient just to touch the anthers fertilisation, should in so many cases be of one flower and then the stigma of another mutually useless to each other 1 How with the same brush to ensure fertilisation; simply are thes^-ffacts explained on the but it must not be supposed that bees view of an occasional cross with a distinct would thus produce a multitude of hybrids individual being advantageous or indis­ between distinct species; for if you bring pensable ! on the same brush a plant’s own pollen and If several varieties of the cabbage, radish, pollen from another species, the former ortion, and of some other plants, be allowed will . have such a prepotent effect that it to seed near each other, a large majority, will invariably and completely destroy, as as I have found, of the seedlings thus has been shown by Gartner, any influence raised will turn out mongrels : for instance, from the foreign pollen. I raised 233 seedling cabbages from some When the stamens of a flower suddenly plants of different varieties growing near spring towards the pistil, or slowly move each other, and of these only 78 were true one after the other towards it, the con­ to their kind, and some even of these were trivance seems adapted solely to ensure not perfectly true. Yet the pistil of each self-fertilisation; and no doubt it is useful cabbage-flower is surrounded not only by for this end ; but the agency of insects is its own six stamens, but by those of the often required to cause the stamens to many other flowers on the same plant. spring forward, as Kblreuter has shown to I How, then, comes it that such a vast be the case with the barberry; and in this I number of the seedlings are mongrelised? very genus, which seems to have a special I suspect that it must arise from the pollen contrivance for self-fertilisation, it is well of a distinct variety having a prepotent known that, if closely-allied forms or effect over a. flower’s own pollen, and that varieties are planted near each other, it is this is part of the general law of good being hardly possible to raise pure seedlings, so derived from the intercrossing of distinct largely do they naturally cross. In many individuals of the same species. When other cases, far from there being any aids distinct species are crossed, the case is for self-fertilisation, there are special con­ directly the reverse, for a plant’s own pollen trivances, as I could show from the writings is always prepotent over foreign pollen ; of C. C. Sprengel and from my own obser­ but to this subject we shall return in a vations, which effectuallyprevent the stigma future chapter. . receiving pollen from its own flower: for In the case of a gigantic tree covered instance, in Lobelia fulgens there is a with innumerable flowers, it may be objected really beautiful and elaborate contrivance that pollen could seldom be carried from by which every one of the infinitely tree to tree, and at most only from flower numerous pollen-granules are swept out of to flower on the same tree, and that flowers the conjoined anthers of each flower before on the same tree can ,be considered as distinct individuals only in a limited sense. the stigma of that individual flower is ready : to receive them ; and as this flower is never I believe this objection to be valid, but that nature has largely provided against it by visited, at least in my garden, by insects, -it never sets a seed, though, by placing giving to trees a strong tendency to bear • pollen from one flower on the stigma of flowers with separated .sexes. When the sexes are separated, although the male and another, I raised plenty of seedlings ; and female flowers may be produced on the . while another species of Lobelia growing same tree, we can see that pollen must be close by, which is visited by bees, seeds regularly carried from flower to flower ; freely. In very many other cases, though and this will give a better chance of pollen there be no special mechanical contrivance being occasionally carried from tree to to prevent the stigma of a flower receiving tree. That trees belonging to all Orders its own pollen, yet, as C. C. Sprengel has have their sexes more often separated than shown, and as I can confirm, either the other plants, I find to be the case in this anthers burst before the stigma is ready for country; and at my request Dr. Hooker fertilisation or the stigma is ready before the pollen of that flower is ready, so that tabulated the trees of New Zealand, and Dr. Asa Gray those of. the United States, -these plants have in fact separated sexes, and the result was as I anticipated. On :and njust habitually be crossed. How the other hand, Dr. Hooker has recently . strange are these facts ! How strange that �NATURAL SELECTION informed me that hl^inds that the rule does not hold in Australia ; and I have made these few remarks on the sexes of trees simply to call attention to the subject. Turning for a very brief space to animals: on the land there are ^^hermaphrodites, as land-mollusca and . earth-worms ; but these all pair. As yet I have not found a single case of a terrestrial animal which fertilises itself. W& can understand this remarkable fact, which offers so strong a contrast with terrestrial plants, on the view of an occasional cross being indispensable, by considering the medium in which terres­ trial animals live, and the nature of the fertilising element; for we know of no means, analogous to the action of insects and of the wind in the case of plants,, by which an occasional cross could be effected with terrestrial animals without the con­ currence of two individuals. Of aquatic animals, there are many self-fertilising hermaphrodites ; but here currents in the water offer an obvious means for an occa­ sional cross. And, as in the case of flowers, I have as yet failed, after consultation with one of the highest authorities—namely, Professor Huxley—to discover a single case of an hermaphodrite animal with the organs of reproduction so perfectly enclosed within the body that access from without and the occasional influence of a distinct individual can be shown to be physically impossible. Cirripedes long appeared to me to present a case of very great difficulty under this point of view ; but I have been enabled, by a fortunate chance, elsewhere to prove that two individuals, though both are self­ fertilising hermaphrodites, do sometimes cross. It must have struck most naturalists as a strange anomaly that in the case of both animals and plants species of the same family, and even of the same genus, though agreeing closely with each other in almost their whole organisation, yet are not rarely some of them hermaphrodites and some of them unisexual. But if, in fact, all hermaphrodites do occasionally intercross with other individuals, the difference between hermaphrodites and unisexual species, as far as function is concerned, becomes very small. From these several considerations, and from the many special facts which I have collected, but which I am not here able to give, I am strongly inclined to suspect that both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms an occasional intercross with a distinct individual is a law of nature. I am well 47 aware that there are, on this view, many cases of difficulty, some of which I am trying to investigate. Finally, then, we may conclude that in many organic beings a cross between -two individuals^ is an obvious necessity for each birth ; in many others it occurs perhaps only at long intervals ; but in none, as I suspect, can self-fertilisation go on for perpetuity.' Circumstances Favourable to Natural Selection—This, is an extremely intricate subject. A large amount of inheritable and diversified variability is favourable, but I believe mere individual differences suffice for the work. A large number of indi­ viduals, by giving a better chance for the appearance within any given period of profitable variations, will compensate for a lesser amount of variability in each indi­ vidual, and is, I believe, an extremely important element of success. Though Nature grants vast periods of time for the work of natural selection, she does not grant an indefinite period ; for as all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature, if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon be exterminated. In man’s methodical selection, a breeder selects for some definite object, and free intercrossing will wholly stop his work. But when many men, without intending to alter the breed, have a nearly common standard of perfection, and all try to get and breed from the best animals, much improvement and modification surely but slowly follow from this unconscious process of selection, notwithstanding a large amount of crossing with inferior animals. Thus it will be in nature ; for within a confined area, with some place in its polity not so perfectly occupied as might be, natural selection will always tend to preserve all the individuals varying in the right direc­ tion, though in different degrees, so as better to fill up the unoccupied place. But if the area be large, its several districts will almost certainly present different conditions of life ; and then, if natural selection be modifying and improving a species in the several districts, there will be intercrossing with the other individuals of the same species on the confines of each. And in this case the effects of intercrossing can hardly be counterbalanced by natural selection always tending to modify all the individuals in each district in exactly the �48 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES same manner to the conditions of each ; only through the principle of inheritance, for in a continuous area the physical con­ and through natural selection destroying ditions at least will generally graduate any which depart from the proper type ; away insensibly from one district to another. but if their conditions of life change, and The intercrossing will most affect those they undergo modification, uniformity of animals which unite for each birth, which character can be^riven to their modified wander much, and which do not breed at a offspring solely by natural selection pre­ very quick rate. Hence in animals of this serving the same favourable variations. nature—for instance, in birds—varieties will Isolation, also, is an important element generally be confined to separated countries; in the process of natural selection. Ina and this I believe to be the case. In her­ confined or isolated area, if not very large, maphrodite organisms which cross only the organic and inorganic conditions of occasionally, and likewise in animals which life will generally be in a great degree unite for each birth, but which wander uniform; so that natural selection will tend little, and which can increase at a very to modify all the individuals of a varying rapid rate, a new and improved variety species throughout the area in the same might be quickly formed on any one spot, manner in relation to the same conditions. and might there maintain itself in a body, Intercrosses, also, with the individuals of so that whatever intercrossing took place the same species which otherwise would would be chiefly between the individuals of have inhabited the surrounding and differ­ the same new variety. A local variety, ently circumstanced districts will be pre­ when once thus formed, might subsequently vented. But isolation probably acts more slowly spread to other districts. On the efficiently in checking the immigration of above principle, nurserymen always prefer better adapted organisms, after any physical getting seed from a large body of plants of change, such as of climate or elevation of the same variety, as the chance of interthe land, etc.; and thus new places in the crossingwith othervarieties is thus lessened. natural economy of the country are left Even in the case of slow-breeding ani­ open for the old inhabitants to struggle for, mals, which unite for each birth, we must and become adapted to, through modifica­ not overrate the effects of intercrossing in i tions in their structure and constitution. retarding natural selection ; for I can bring Lastly, isolation, by checking immigration, a considerable catalogue of facts showing and consequently competition, will give that within the same area varieties of the time for any new variety to be slowly same animal can long remain distinct, from improved; and this may sometimes be of haunting different stations, from breeding importance in the production of new species. at slightly different seasons, or from varie­ If, however, an isolated area be very small, ties of the same kind preferring to pair either from being surrounded by barriers together. or from having very peculiar physical con­ ditions, the total number of the individuals Intercrossing plays a very important supported on it will necessarily be very part in nature in keeping the individuals of the same species, or of the same variety, small ; and fewness of individuals will greatly retard the production of new species true and uniform in character. It will through natural selection by decreasing obviously thus act far more efficiently with those animals which unite for each birth ; the chance of the appearance of favourable variations. but I have already attempted to show that If we turn to nature to test the truth of we have reason to believe that occasional these remarks, and look at any small intercrosses take place with all animals isolated area, such as an oceanic island, and with all plants. Even if these take although the total number of the species place only at long intervals, I am convinced inhabiting it will be found to be small, as that the young thus produced will gain so we shall see in our chapter on Geographical much in vigour and fertility over the off­ Distribution ; yet of these species a very spring from long-continued self-fertilisation, large proportion are endemic—that is, that they will have a better chance of sur­ have been produced there, and nowhere viving and propagating their kind ; and else. Hence an oceanic island at first thus, in the long run, the influence of sight seems to have been highly favourable intercrosses, even at rare intervals, will be for the production of new species. But we great. If there exist organic beings which never intercross, uniformity of character may thus greatly deceive ourselves, for to ascertain whether a small isolated area, or can be retained among them, as long as a large open area like a continent, has been their conditions of life remain the same, �NATURAL SELECTION most favourable for .the production of neworganic forms, we ought to make the com­ parison within equal times; and this we are incapable of doing. Although I do not doubt that isolation is of considerable importance in the produc­ tion of new species, on the whole I am inclined to believe that largeness of area is of more importanoe, more especially in the production of species which will prove capable of enduring for a long period and of spreading widely. Throughout a great and open area not only will there be a better chance of favourable variations arising from the large number of individuals of the same species there supported, but the conditions of life are infinitely complex from the large number of already existing species ; and if some of these many species become modified and improved, others will have to be improved in a corresponding degree, or they will be exterminated. Each new form also, as soon as it has been much improved, will be able to spread over the open and continuous area, and will thus come into competition with many others. Hence more new places will be formed, and the competition to fill them will be more severe, on a large than on a small and isolated area. Moreover, great areas, though now continuous owing to oscilla­ tions of level, will often have recently existed in a broken condition, so that the good effects of isolation will generally, tp a certain extent, have concurred. Finally, I conclude that, although small isolated areas probably have been in some respects highly favourable for the production of new species, yet that the course of modification will generally have been more rapid on large areas ; and, what is more important, that the new forms produced on large areas, which already have been victorious over many competitors, will be those that will spread most widely, will give rise to most new varieties and species, and will thus play an important part in the changing history of the organic world. We can, perhaps, on these views, under­ stand some facts which will be again alluded to in our chapter on Geographical Distribution ; for instance, that the pro­ ductions of the smaller continent of Australia have formerly yielded, and apparently are now yielding, before those of the larger Europaso-Asiatic area. Thus, also, it is that continental productions have everywhere become so largely naturalised on islands. On a small island the race for life will have been less severe, and 49 there will h ave been less modification and less extermination. Hence, perhaps, it comes that the flora of Madeira, according to Oswald Heer, resembles the extinct tertiary flora of Europe. All fresh-water basins, taken together, make a small area compared with that of the sea or of the land ; and, consequently, the competition between fresh-water productions will have been less severe than elsewhere ; new forms will have been more slowly formed, and old forms more slowly exterminated. And it is in fresh water that we find seven genera of Ganoid fishes, remnants of a once preponderant order; and in fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale. These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils ; they have endured to the present day from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition. To sum up the circumstances favourable and unfavourable to natural selection, as far as the extreme intricacy of the subject permits. I conclude, looking to the future, that for terrestrial productions a large con­ tinental area, which will probably undergo many oscillations of level, and which conse­ quently will exist for long periods in a broken condition, is the most favourable for the production of many new forms of life likely to endure tong and to spread widely. For the area first existed as a continent, and the inhabitants, at this period numerous in individuals and kinds, will have been subjected to very severe competition. When converted by sub­ sidence into large separate islands, there will still exist many individuals of the same species on each island : intercrossing on the confines of the range of each species will thus be checked : after physical changes of any kind immigration will be prevented, so that new places in the polity of each island will have to be filled up by modifications of the old inhabitants ; and time will be allowed for the varieties in each to become well modified and perfected. When, by renewed elevation, the islands shqjl be reconverted into a continental area, there will again be severe competition: the most favoured or improved varieties will be enabled to spread ; there will be much extinction of the less improved forms, and the relative proportional numbers of the various inhabitants of the renewed E �5o ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES continent will again be changed; and again there will be a fair field for natural selection to improve still further the inhabi­ tants, and thus produce new species. That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness I fully admit. Its action depends on there being places in the polity of nature which can be better occupied by some of the inhabitants of the country undergoing modification of some kind. • The existence of such places will often depend on physical changes,-which are generally very slow, and on the immi­ gration of better-adapted forms having been checked. But the action of natural selection will probably still oftener depend on some of the inhabitants becoming slowly modified, the mutual relations of many of the other inhabitants being thus dis­ turbed. Nothing can be effected unless favourable variations occur, and variation itself is apparently always a very slow process. The process will often be greatly retarded by free intercrossing. Many will exclaim that these several causes are amply sufficient wholly to stop the action of natural selection. I do not believe so. On the other hand, I do believe that natural selec­ tion always acts very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a very few of the inhabitants of the same region at the same time. I further believe that this very slow, intermittent action of natural selection accords perfectly well with what, geology tells us of the rate and manner a’t which the inhabitants of this world have changed. Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection. Extinction.—This subject will be more fully discussed in. our chapter on Geology ; but it must be here alluded to from being intimately connected with natural selection. Natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure. But as, from the high geometrical ratio of increase of all organic beings, each area is already fully stocked with inhabitants, it follows that, as each selected and favoured form increases in number, so will the less favoured forms decrease and become rare. Rarity, as geology tells us, is'the precursor to extinction. We can also see that any form represented by few individuals will, during fluctuations in the seasons or in the number of its enemies, rui^ a good chance of utter extinction. But we may go further than this ; for as new forms are continually and slowly being produced, unless we believe that the number of specific forms goes on perpetually and almost indefinitely increas­ ing, numbers inevitably must become extinct. That the number of specific forms has not indefinitely increased geology shows us plainly ; and, indeed, we can see reason why they should not have thus increased, for the number of places in the polity of nature is not indefinitely great—not that we have any means of knowing that any one region has as yet got its maximum of species. Probably no region is as yet fully stocked, for at the Cape of Good Hope, where more species of plants are crowded together than in any other quarter of the world, some foreign plants have become naturalised, without causing, as far as we know, the extinction of any natives. Furthermore, the species which are most numerous in individuals will have the best chance of producing within any given period favourable variations. We have evidence of this in the facts given in the second chapter, showing that it is the common species which afford the greatest number of recorded varieties, or incipient species. Hence, rare species will, be less quickly modified or improved within any given period, and they will consequently be beaten in the race for life by the modified descen­ dants of the commoner species. From these several considerations I think it inevitably follows that, as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improve­ ment will naturally suffer most. And we have seen in the chapter on the Struggle for Existence that it is the most closelyallied forms—varieties of the same species, and species of the same genus or of related genera—which, from haying nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competi­ tion with each other. Consequently, each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exter­ minate them. We see the same process of extermination among our domesticated �NATURAL SELECTION productions, through the selection of im­ proved forms by man. Many curious in­ stances could be given showing how quickly new breeds of cattle, sheep, and other ani­ mals, and varies of flowers, take the place of older and inferior kinds. In Yorkshire it' is historically known that the ancient black cattle were displaced by the long-horns, and that these “were swept away by the short-horns” (I quote the words of an agricultural writer) “ as if by some murder­ ous pestilence.” Divergence of Character.—'The principle which I have designated by this term is of high importance on my theory, and explains, as I believe, several important facts. In the first place, varieties, even stronglymarked ones, though having somewhat of the character of species—as is shown by the hopeless doubts in many cases how to rank them—yet certainly differ from each other far less than do good and distinct species. Nevertheless, according to my view, varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species. How, then, does the lesser difference between varieties become augmented’into the greater difference between species ? That this does habitually happen we must infer from most of the innumerable species throughout nature presenting well-marked differences; whereas varieties, the supposed prototypes and parents of future well-marked species, present slight and ill-defined dif­ ferences. Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents, and the offspring of this variety again to differ from its parent in the very same character and in a greater degree; but this alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of dif­ ference as that between varieties of the same species and species of the same genus. As has always been my practice, let us . seek light on this head from our domestic productions. We shall-here find some­ thing analogous. A fancier is struck ’ by a pigeon having a slightly shorter beak ; another fancier is struck by a pigeon having a rather longer beak; and on the acknowledged principle that “ fanciers do not and will not admire a medium standard, but like extremes,” they both go on (as has actually occurred with tumbler-pigeons) choosing and breeding from birds with longer and longer beaks, or with shorter and shorter beaks. Again, we may suppose that at-an early period one man preferred swifter horses ; another stronger and more 5i bulky horses. The ea£ly differences would be very slight; in the course of time, from the continued selection of swifter horses by some breeders, and of stronger ones by others, the differences would become greater, and would be noted as forming two sub-breeds; finally, after the lapse of centuries, the sub-breeds would become converted into two well-established and distinct breeds. As the differences slowly become greater, the inferior animals with intermediate characters, being neither very swift nor very strong, will have been neglected, and will have tended to dis­ appear. Here, then, we see in man’s pro­ ductions the action of what may be called the principle of divergence, causing differ­ ences, at first barely appreciable, steadily to increase, and the breeds to diverge in character both from each other and from their common parent. But how, it may be asked, can any analo­ gous principle apply in nature ? I believe it can and does apply most efficiently, from the simple circumstance that the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diver­ sified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers. We can clearly see this in the case of animals with simple habits. Take the case of a carnivorous quadruped, of which the number that can be supported in any country has long ago arrived at its full average. If its natural powers of increase be allowed to act, it can succeed in increas­ ing (the country not undergoing any change in its conditions) only by its varying descen­ dants seizing on places at present occupied by other animals : some of them, for instance, being enabled to feed on new kinds of prey, either dead or alive ; some inhabiting new stations, climbing trees, frequenting water, and some perhaps becoming less car­ nivorous. The more diversified in habits and structure the descendants of our car­ nivorous animal became, the more places they would be enabled to occupy. What applies to one animal will apply throughout all time to all animals—that is, if they vary—for otherwise natural selection can do nothing. So it will be with plants. It has been experimentally proved that if a plot of ground be sown with one species of grass, and a similar plot be sown with several distinct genera of grasses, a greater number of plants and a greater weight of dry herbage can thus be raised. The same �52 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES has been found to hold good when first one variety and then several mixed varieties of wheat have been sown on equal spaces of ground. Hence, if any one species of grass were to go on varying, and those varieties were continually selected which differed from each other in at all the same manner as distinct species and genera of grasses differ from each other, a greater number of individual plants of this species of grass, including its modified descendants, would succeed in living on the same piece of ground. And we well know that each species and each variety of grass is annually sowing almost countless seeds, and thus, as it may be said, is striving its utmost to increase its numbers. Consequently, I cannot doubt that in the course of many thousands of generations the most distinct varieties of any one species of grass would always have the best chance of succeeding and of increasing in numbers, and thus of supplanting the less distinct varieties ; and varieties, when rendered very distinct from each other, take the rank of. species. The truth of the principle, that the greatest amount of life can be supported by great diversification of structure, is seen under many natural circumstances. In an ex­ tremely small area, especially if freely open to immigration, and where the contest between individual and individual must be severe, we always find great diversity in its inhabitants. For instance, I found that a piece of turf, three feet by four in size, which had been exposed for many years to exactly the same conditions, supported twenty species of plants, and these belonged to eighteen genera and to eight orders, which shows how much these plants differed from each other. So it is with the plants and insects on small and uniform islets ; and so in small ponds of fresh water. Farmers find that they can raise most food by a rotation of plants belonging to the most different orders : nature follows what may be called a simultaneous rotation. Most of the animals and plants which live close round any small piece of ground could live on it (supposing it not to be in any way peculiar in its nature), and may be said to be striving to the utmost to live there ; but it is seen that, where they come into the closest competition with each other, the advantages of diversification of struc­ ture, with the accompanying differences of habit and constitution, determine that the inhabitants, which thus jostle each other most closely, shall, as a general rule, belong to what we call different genera and orders. The same principle is seen in the natural­ isation of plants through man’s agency in foreign lands. It might have been expected that the plants which have succeeded in becoming naturalised in any land would generally have been closely allied to the indigenes ; for these are commonly looked at as specially created and adapted for their own country. It might, also, perhaps have been expected that naturalised plants would have belonged to a few groups more especially adapted to certain stations in their new homes. But the case is very different; and Alph. de Candolle has well remarked, in his great and admirable work, that floras gain by naturalisation, propor­ tionally with the number of the native genera and species, far more in new genera than in new species. To give a single instance : in the last edition of Dr. Asa Gray’s Manual of the Flora of the Northern United States 260 naturalised plants are enumerated, and these belong to 162 genera. We thus see that these naturalised plants are of a highly diversified nature. They differ, moreover, to a large extent from the indigenes, for out of the 162 genera no less than 100 genera are not there indigenous, and thus a large proportional addition is made to the genera of these States. By considering the nature of the plants or animals which have struggled success­ fully with the indigenes of any country, and have there become naturalised, we may gain some crude idea in what manner some of the natives would have to be modified in order to gain an advantage over the other natives; and we may, at least, safely infer that diversification of structure, amounting to new generic differ­ ences, would be profitable to them. The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body—a subject so well elucidated by Milne Edwards. No physio­ logist doubts that a stomach adapted to digest vegetable matter alone, or flesh alone, draws most nutriment from these substances. So, in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there supporting themselves. A set of animals, with their organisation but little diversified, could hardly compete with a set more per­ fectly diversified in structure. It may be doubted,for instance, whether the Australian �NATURAL SELECTION marsupials, which are divided into groups differing but little from each other, and feebly representing, as Mr. Waterhouse and others have remarked, our carnivorous, ruminant, and rodent mammals, could suc­ cessfully compete with these well-proiiounced orders. In the Australian mammals we see the process of diversification in an early and incomplete stage of development. After the foregoing discussion, which ought to have been much amplified, we may, I think, assume that the modified descendants of anyone species will succeed by so much the better as they become more diversified in structure, and are thus enabled to encroach on places occupied by other beings. Now let us see how this principle of benefit being derived from divergence of character, combined with the principles of natural selection and of extinction, will tend to act. The accompanying diagram1 will aid us in understanding this rather perplexing subject. Let A to L represent the species of a genus large in its own country ; these species are supposed to resemble each other in unequal degrees, as is so generally the case in nature, and as is represented in the diagram by the letters standing at unequal distances. I have said a large genus, because we have seen in the second chapter that on an average more of the species of large genera vary than of small genera ; and the varying species of the large genera present a greater number of varieties. We have also seen that the species, which are the commonest and the most widely-diffused, vary more than rare species with restricted ranges. Let (A) be a common, widely-diffused, and varying species, belonging to a genus large in its own country. The little fan of diverging dotted lines of unequal lengths proceeding from (A) may represent its varying offspring. The variations are sup­ posed to be extremely slight, but of the most diversified nature ; they are not supposed all to appear simultaneously, but often after long intervals of time ; nor are they all supposed to endure for equal periods. Only those variations which are in some way profitable will be preserved or naturally selected. And here the importance of the principle of benefit being derived from divergence of character comes in; for this will generally lead to the most different or divergent variations (repre­ sented by the outei' dotted lines) being 1 See diagram at the commencement of volume. 53 preserved and accumulated by natural selection. When a dotted line reaches one of the horizontal lines, and is there marked by a small numbered letter, a sufficient amount of variation is supposed to have been accumulated to have formed a fairly well-marked variety, such as would be thought worthy of record in a systematic work. The intervals between the horizontal lines in the diagram may represent each a thousand generations ; but it would have been better if each had represented ten thousand generations. After a thousand generations, species (A) is supposed to have produced two fairly well-marked varieties— namely, a1 and zzz1. These two varieties will generally continue to be exposed to the same conditions which made their parents variable, and the tendency to variability is in itself hereditary; consequently they will tend to vary, and generally to vary in nearly the same manner as their parents varied. Moreover, these two varieties, being only slightly modified forms, will tend to inherit those advantages which made their parent (A) more numerous than most of the other inhabitants of the same country ; they will likewise partake of those more general advantages which made the genus to which the parent-species belonged a large genus in its own country. And these circumstances we know to be favourable to the production of new varieties. If, then, these two varieties be variable, the most divergent of' their variations will generally be preserved during the next thousand generations. And after this inter­ val variety a1 is supposed in the diagram to have produced variety zz2, which will, owing to the principle of divergence, differ more from (A) than did variety a1. Variety wz1 is supposed to have produced two varie­ ties—namely, m2 and V, differing from each other, and more considerably from their common parent (A). We may continue the process by similar steps for any length of time; some of the varieties, after each thousand generations, producing only a single variety, but in a more and more modified condition, some producing two or three varieties, and some failing to produce any. Thus the varieties or modified des­ cendants, proceeding from the common parent (A), will generally go on increasing in number and diverging in character. In the diagram the process is represented up to the ten-thousandth generation, and under a condensed and simplified form up to the fourteen-thousandth generation. �54 , ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES But I must here remark that I do not suppose that the process ever goes on so regularly as is represented in the diagram, though in itself made somewhat irregular. I am far from thinking that the most diver­ gent varieties will invariably prevail and multiply : a medium form may often long endure, and may or may not produce more than one modified descendant; for natural selection will always act according to the nature of the places which are either un­ occupied or not perfectly occupied by other beings ; and this will depend on infinitely complex relations. But, as a general rule, the more diversified in structure the descen­ dants from any one species can be rendered, the more places they will be enabled to seize on, and the more their modified progeny will be increased. In our diagram the line of succession is broken at regular intervals by small numbered letters marking the successive forms which have become suffi­ ciently distinct to be recorded as varieties. But these breaks are imaginary, and might have been inserted anywhere, after intervals long enough to have allowed the accumula­ tion of a considerable amount of divergent variation. As all the modified descendants from a common and widely-diffused species, be­ longing to a large genus, will tend to partake of the same advantages which made their parent successful in life, they will generally go on multiplying in number as well as diverging in character : this is represented in the diagram by the several divergent branches proceeding from (A). The modi­ fied offspring from the later and more highly improved branches in the lines of descent will, it is probable, often take the place of, and so destroy, the earlier and less improved branches : this is represented in the diagram by some of the lower branches not reaching to the upper horizontal lines. In some cases I do not doubt that the process of modifica­ tion will be confined to a single line of descent, and the number of the descendants will not be increased ; although the amount of divergent modification may have been increased in the successive generations. This case would be represented in the diagram if all the lines proceeding from (A) were removed, excepting that from aT to <zra. In the same way, for instance, the English race-horse and English pointer have apparently both gone on slowly diverg­ ing in character from their original stocks, without either having given off any fresh branches or races. After ten thousand generations, species (A) is supposed to have produced three forms, a10,/10, and ot10, which, from having diverged in charactei' during the successive generations, will have come to differ largely, but perhaps unequally, from each other and from their common parent. If we suppose the amount of change between each horizontal line in our diagram to be excessively small, these three forms may still be only well-marked varieties; or they may have arrived at the doubtful category of sub-species ; but we have only to suppose the steps, in the process of modification to be more numerous or greater in amount, to convert these three forms into well-defined species : thus the diagram illustrates the steps by which the small differences dis­ tinguishing varieties are increased into the larger differences distinguishing species. By continuing the same process for a greater number of generations (as shown in the diagram in a condensed and simplified manner) we get eight species, marked by the letters between aP and z/z14, all des­ cended from (A). Thus, as I believe, species are multiplied and genera are formed. In a large genus it is probable that more than one species would vary. In the dia­ gram I have assumed that a second species (I) has produced, by analogous steps, after ten thousand generations, either two wellmarked varieties (w10 and 2'10) or two species, according to the amount of change supposed to be represented between the horizontal lines. After fourteen thousand generations, six new species, marked by the letters nP to .s'14, are supposed to have been produced. In each genus the species, which are already extremely different in character, will generally tend to produce the greatest number of modified descendants; for these will have the best chance of filling new and widely different places in the polity of nature : hence in the diagram I have chosen the extreme species (A), and the nearly extreme species (I), as those which have largely varied, and have given rise to new varieties and species. The other nine species (marked by* capital letters) of our original genus may for a long period con­ tinue to transmit unaltered descendants ; and this is shown in the diagram by the dotted lines not prolonged far upwards from want of space. But during the process of modification, represented in the diagram, another of our principles, namely that of extinction, will have played an important part. As in each fully-stocked country natural selection �NATURAL SELECTION necessarily acts by the selected form having some advantage in the struggle for life over other forms, there will be a constant tendency in the improved descendants of any one species to supplant and exterminate in each stage of descent their predecessors and their original parent. For it should be remembered that the competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution, and structure. Hence all the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parent­ species itself, will generally tend to become extinct. So it probably will be with many whole collateral lines of descent, which will be conquered by later and improved lines of descent. If, however, the modified off­ spring of a species get into some distinct country, or become quickly adapted to some quite new station, in which child and parent do not come into competition, both may continue to exist. If, then, our diagram be assumed to represent a considerable amount of modifi­ cation, species (A) and all the earlier varieties will have become extinct, having been replaced by eight new species (k?14 to zzz14); and (I) will have been replaced by six (w14 to .s’14) new species. But we may go further than this. The original species of our genus were supposed to resemble each other in unequal degrees, as is so generally the case in nature ; species (A) being more nearly related to B, C, and D than to the other species; and species (I) more to G, H, K, L, than to the others. These two species (A) and (I) were also supposed to be very common and widely diffused species, so that they must originally have had some advantage over most of the other species of the genus. Their modified descendants, fourteen in number at the fourteen-thousandth generation, will pro­ bably have inherited some of the same advantages : they have also been modified and improved in a diversified manner at each stage of descent so as to have become adapted to many related places in the natural economy of their country. It seems, therefore, to me extremely probable that they will have taken the places of, and thus exterminated, not only their parents (A) and (I), but likewise some of the original species which were most nearly related to their parents. Hence very few of the original species will have transmitted offspring to the fourteen-thousandth genera­ 55 tion. We may suppose that only one (F) of the two species which were least closely related to the other nine original species has transmitted descendants to this late stage of descent. The new species in our diagram des­ cended from the original eleven species will now be fifteen in number. Owing to the divergent tendency of natural selection, the extreme amount of difference in charac­ ter between species zz14 and 2-14 will be much greater than that between the most different of the original eleven species. The new species, moreover, will be allied to each other in a widely different manner. Of the eight descendants from (A) the three marked zz14, y14, /I4, will be nearly related from having recently branched off from a10; Z>14 and/'4, from having diverged at an earlier period from a5, will be in some degree distinct from the three first-named species ; and, lastly, c>14, F4, and m14 will be nearly related one to the other, but, from having diverged at the first commencement of the process of modification, will be widely different from the other five species, and may constitute a sub-genus, or even a distinct genus. The six descendants from (I) will form two sub-genera, or even genera. But as the original species (I) differed largely from (A), standing nearly at the extreme points of the original genus, the six descendants from (I) will, owing to inheritance alone, differ considerably from the eight descen­ dants from (A) ; the two groups, moreover, are supposed to have gone on diverging in different directions. The intermediate species, also (and this is a very important consideration), which connected the original species (A) and (I), have all become, except­ ing (F), extinct, and have left no descendants. Hence the six new species descended from (I), and the eight descended from (A), will have to be ranked as very distinct genera, or even as distinct sub-families. Thus it is, as I believe, that two or more genera are produced by descent with modification, from two or more species of the same genus. And the two or more parent-species are supposed to have des­ cended from some one species of an earlier genus. In our diagram this is indicated by the broken lines beneath the capital letters converging in sub-branches down­ wards towards a single point ; this point representing a single species, the supposed single parent of our several new sub-genera and genera. It is worth while to reflect for a moment �56 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES on the character of the new species F14, which is supposed not to have diverged much in character, but to have retained the form of (F) either unaltered or altered only in a slight degree. In this case, its affinities to the other fourteen new species will be of a curious and circuitous nature. Having descended from a form which stood between the two parent-species (A) and (I), now supposed to be extinct and unknown, it will be in some degree inter­ mediate in character between the two groups descended from these species. But as these two groups have gone on diverging in character from the type of their parents, the new species (f14) will not be directly intermediate between them, but rather between types of the two groups ; and every naturalist will be able to bring some such case before his mind. In the diagram each horizontal line has hitherto been supposed to represent a thousand generations, but each may repre­ sent a million or hundred million genera­ tions, and likewise a section of the succes­ sive strata of the earth’s crust, including extinct remains. We shall, when we come to our chapter on Geology, have to refer again to this subject, and I think we shall then see that the diagram throws light on the affinities of extinct beings, which, though generally belonging to the same orders, or families, or genera, with those now living, yet are often, in some degree, intermediate in character between existing groups ; and we can understand this fact, for the extinct species lived at very ancient epochs when the branching lines of descent had diverged less. I see no reason to limit the process of modification, as now explained, to the formation of genera alone. If, in our diagram, we suppose the amount of change represented by each successive group of diverging dotted lines to be very great, the forms marked a14 to/I4, those marked <J14 and /I4, and those marked <914 to z«14, will form three very distinct genera. We shall also have two very distinct genera descended from (I); and as these latter two genera, both from continued divergence of character and from inheritance from a different parent, will differ widely from the three genera descended from (A), the two little groups of genera will form two distinct families, or even orders, according to the amount of divergent modification supposed to be represented in the diagram. And the two new families, or orders, will have descended from two species of the original genus ; and these two species are supposed to have descended from one species of a still more ancient and unknown genus. We have seen that in each country it is the species of the larger genera which oftenest present varieties or incipient species. This, indeed, might have been expected ; for, as natural selection acts through one form having some advantage over other forms in the struggle for existence, it will chiefly act on those which already have some advantage ; and the largeness of any group shows that its species have inherited from a common ancestor some advantage in common. Hence, the struggle for the production of new and modified descendants will mainly lie between the larger groups, which are all trying to increase in number. One large group will slowly conquer another large group, reduce its numbers, and thus lessen its chance of further variation and improvement. Within the same large group the later and more highly perfected sub-groups, from branching out and seizing on many new places in the polity of nature, will constantly tend to supplant and destroy the earlier and less improved sub-groups. Small and broken groups and sub-groups will finally disappear. Lool^jng to the future, we can predict that the groups of organic beings which are now large and triumphant, and which are least broken up—that is, which as yet have suffered least extinction—will for a long period continue to increase. But which groups will ultimately prevail no man can predict; for we well know that many groups, formerly most extensively developed, have now become extinct. Looking still more remotely to the future, we may predict that, owing to the continued and steady increase of the larger groups, a multitude of smaller groups will become utterly extinct, and leave no modified descendants ; and, con­ sequently, that of the species living at one period, extremely few will transmit descen­ dants to a remote futurity. I shall have to return to this subject in the chapter on Classification, but I may add that on this view of extremely few of the more ancient species having transmitted descendants, and on the view of all the descendants of the same species making a class, we can understand how it is that there exist but very few classes in each main division of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Although extremely few of the most ancient species may now have living and modified descendants, yet at the most remote geo­ logical period the earth may have been as �NATURAL SELECTION well peopled with many species of many genera, families, orders, and classes as at the present day. Summary of Chapter.— If, during the long course of ages and under varying condi­ tions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed ; if there be, owing to the high geometrical ratio of increase of each species, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitu­ tion, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extra­ ordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same manner as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if varia­ tions useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection ; and it leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and in­ organic conditions of life. Natural selection, on the principle of qualities being inherited at corresponding ages, can modify the egg, seed, or young, as easily as the adult. Among many animals sexual selection will give its aid to ordinary selection, by assuring to the most vigorous and best adapted males the greatest number of offspring. Sexual selection will also give characters useful to the males alone in their struggles with other males. Whether natural selection has really thus acted in nature, in modifying and adapting the various forms of life to their several conditions and stations, must be judged of by the general tenor and balance of evidence given in the following chapters. But we already see how it entails extinction ; and how largely extinction has acted in the world’s history geology plainly declares. Natural selection also leads to divergence of character ; for more living beings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and con­ stitution, of which we see proof by looking to the inhabitants of any small spot or to naturalised productions. Therefore, during 57 the modification of the descendants of any one species, and during the incessant struggle of all species to increase in num­ bers, the more diversified these descendants become, the better will be their chance of succeeding in the battle for life. Thus the small differences distinguishing varieties of the same species steadily tend to increase till they come to equal the greater differ­ ences between species of the same genus, or even of distinct genera. We have seen that it is the common, the widely-diffused, and widely-ranging species belonging to the larger genera which vary most ; and these tend to transmit to their modified offspring that superiority which now makes them dominant in their own countries. Natural selection, as has just been remarked, leads to divergence of character and to much extinction of the less improved and intermediate forms of life. On these principles, I believe, the nature of the affinities of all organic beings may be explained. It is a truly, wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group in the manner which we everywhere behold—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub­ classes, and classes. The several subor­ dinate groups in any class cannot be ranked in a single file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these round other points, and so on in almost endless cycles. On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classi­ fication of all organic beings ; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character, as we have seen illustrated in the diagram. The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been repre­ sented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species ; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succes­ sion of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to �58 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was small, budding twigs ; and this connection of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classifica­ tion of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush only two: or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches ; so with the species which lived during long-past geolo­ gical periods, very few now have living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various sizes may repre­ sent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living represen­ tatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competi­ tion by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful rami­ fications. Chapter V. LAWS OF VARIATION Effects of external conditions—Use and disuse, combined with natural selection ; organs of flight and of vision—Acclimatisation—Correla­ tion of growth—Compensation and economy of growth—False correlations—Multiple, rudi­ mentary, and lowly organised structure variable —Parts developed in an unusual manner are highly variable : specific characters more variable than generic: secondary sexual cha­ racters variable—Species of the same genus vary in an analogous manner—Reversions to long-lost characters—Summary. I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations—-so common and multiform in organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree in those in a state of nature—had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation. Some authors believe it to be as much the function of the reproductive system to produce individual differences, or very slight deviations of structure, as to make the child like its parents. But the much greater variability, as well as the greater frequency of monstrosities under domestication or cultivation than under nature, leads me to believe that deviations of structure are in some way due to the nature of the conditions of life to which the parents and their more remote ancestors have been exposed during several genera­ tions. I have remarked in the first chapter —but a long catalogue of facts which cannot be here given would be necessary to show the truth of the remark—that the reproductive system is eminently susceptible to changes in the conditions of life; and to this system being functionally disturbed in the parents I chiefly attribute the varying or plastic condition of the offspring. The male and female sexual elements seem to be affected before that union takes place which is to form a new being. In the case of “ sporting ” plants, the bud, which in its earliest condition does not apparently differ essentially from an ovule, is alone affected. �LAWS OF VARIATION But why, because the reproductive system is disturbed, this or that part should vary more or less we are profoundly ignorant. Nevertheless, we can here and there dimly catch a faint ray of light, and we may feel sure that there must be some cause for each deviation of structure, however slight. How much direct effect difference of climate, food, etc., produces on any being is extremely doubtful. My impression is that the effect is extremely small in the case of animals, but perhaps rather more in that of plants. We may, at least, safely conclude that such influences cannot have produced the many striking and complex co-adaptations of structure between one organic being and another which we see everywhere throughout nature. Some little influence may be attributed to climate, food, etc. : thus, E. Forbes speaks confidently that shells,at their southern limit, and when living in shallow water, are more brightly coloured than those of the same species further north or from greater depths. Gould believes that birds of the same species are more brightly coloured under a clear atmos­ phere than when living on islands or near the coast. So with insects, Wollaston is convinced that residence near the sea affects their colours. Moquin-Tandon gives a list of plants, which, when growing near the sea-shore, have their leaves in some degree fleshy, though not elsewhere fleshy. Several other such cases could be given. The fact of varieties of one species, when they range into the zone of habitation of other species, often acquiring in a very slight degree some of the characters of such species, accords with our view that species of all kinds are only well-marked and permanent varieties. Thus the species of shells which are confined to tropical and shallow seas are generally brightercoloured than those confined to cold and deeper seas. The birds which are confined to continents are, according to Mr. Gould, brighter-coloured than those of islands. The insect-species confined to sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid. Plants which live exclusively on the sea-side are very apt to have fleshy leaves. He who believes in the creation of each species will have to say that this shell, for instance, was created with bright colours for a warm sea ; but that this other shell became bright-coloured by variation when it ranged into warmer or shallower waters. When a variation is of the slightest use. to a being, we cannot tell how much of it 59 to attribute to the accumulative action of natural selection, and how much to the conditions of life. Thus, it is well known to furriers that animals of the same species have thicker and better fur the more severe the climate is under which they have lived ; but who can tell how much of this difference may be due to the warmest-clad individuals having been favoured and preserved during many generations, and how much to the direct action of the severe climate ? for it would appear that climate has some direct action on the hair of our domestic quadrupeds. Instances could be given of the same variety being produced under conditions of life as different as can well be conceived ; and, on the other hand, of different varieties being produced from the same species under the- same conditions. Such facts show how indirectly the conditions of life act. Again, innumerable instances are known to every naturalist of species keeping true, or not varying at all, although living under the most opposite climates. Such considerations as these incline me to lay very little weight on the direct action of the conditions of life. Indirectly, as already remarked, they seem to play an important part in affecting the reproductive system, and in thus inducing variability ; and natural selection will then accumulate all profitable variations, however slight, until they become plainly developed and appreciable by us. Effects of Use and Disuse.—From the facts alluded to in the first chapter, I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them ; and that such modifications are inherited. Under free nature we can have no standard of comparison by which to judge of the effects of long-continued use or disuse, for we know not the parent forms ; but many animals have structures which can be explained by the effects of disuse. As Professor Owen has remarked, there is no greater anomaly in nature than, a bird that cannot fly; yet there are several in this state. The logger-headed duck of South America can only flap along the surface of the water, and has its wings in nearly the same condition as the domestic Aylesbury duck. As the larger ground­ feeding birds seldom take flight except to escape danger, I believe that the nearly wingless condition of several birds which now inhabit . or have lately inhabited �6o ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES several oceanic islands, tenanted by no beast of prey, has been caused by disuse. The ostrich, indeed, inhabits continents and is exposed to danger from which it cannot escape by flight, but by kicking it can defend itself from enemies, as well as any of the smaller quadrupeds. We may imagine that the early progenitor of the ostrich had habits like those of a bustard, and that, as natural selection increased in successive generations the size and weight of its body, its legs were used more and its wings less, until they became incapable of flight. Kirby has remarked (and I have observed the same fact) that the anterior tarsi, or feet, of many male dung-feeding beetles are very often broken off; he examined seventeen specimens in his own collection, and not one had even a relic left. In the Onites apelies the tarsi are so habitually lost that the insect has been described as not having them. In some other genera they are present, but in a rudimentary con­ dition. In the Ateuchus or sacred beetle of the Egyptians they are totally deficient. There is not sufficient evidence to induce me to believe that mutilations are ever in­ herited ; and I should prefer explaining the entire absence of the anterior tarsi in Ateuchus, and their rudimentary condition in some other genera, by the long-continued effects of disuse in their progenitors ; for, as the tarsi are almost always lost in many dung-feeding beetles, they must be lost early in life, and therefore cannot be much used by these insects. In some cases we might easily put down to disuse modifications of structure which are wholly, or mainly, due to natural selec­ tion. Mr. Wollaston has discovered the remarkable fact that 200 beetles out of the 550 species inhabiting Madeira are so far deficient in wings that they cannot fly; and that of the twenty-nine endemic genera no less than.twenty-three genera have all their species in this condition ! Several facts—namely, that beetles in many parts of the world are frequently blown to sea and perish ; that the beetles in Madeira, as observed by Mr. Wollaston, lie much con­ cealed, until the wind lulls and the sun shines; that the proportion of wingless beetles is larger on the exposed Desertas than in Madeira itself; and especially the extraordinary fact, so strongly insisted on by Mr. Wollaston, of the almost entire absence of certain large groups of beetles, elsewhere excessively numerous, and which groups have habits of life almost necessi­ tating frequent flight : these several con­ siderations have made me believe that the wingless condition of so many Madeira beetles is mainly due to the action of natural selection, but combined probably with disuse. For during thousands of suc­ cessive generations each individual beetle which flew least, either from its wings having been ever so little less perfectly developed or from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of surviving from not being blown out to sea ; and, on the other hand, those beetles which most readily took to flight would oftenest have been blown to sea, and thus have been destroyed. The insects in Madeira which are not ground-feeders, and which, as the flower­ feeding coleoptera and lepidoptera, must ■ habitually use their wings to gain their sub­ sistence, have, as Mr. Wollaston suspects, their wings not at all reduc d, but even enlarged. This is quite compatible with the action of natural selection. For, when a new insect first arrived on the island, the tendency of natural selection to enlarge or to reduce the wings would depend on whether a greater number of individuals were saved by successfully battling with the winds, or by giving up the attempt and rarely or never flying. As with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all, and had stuck to the wreck. The eyes of moles and of some burrow­ ing rodents are rudimentary in size, and in some cases are quite covered up by skin and fur. This state of the eyes is probably due to gradual reduction from disuse, but aided perhaps by natural selection. In South America a burrowing rodent, the tuco-tuco, or Ctenomys, is even more sub­ terranean in its habits than the mole ; and I was assured by a Spaniard who had often caught them that they were frequently blind ; one which I kept alive was certainly in this condition, the cause, as appeared on dissection, having been inflammation of the nictitating membrane. As frequent in­ flammation of the eyes must be injurious to any animal, and as eyes are certainly not indispensable to animals with subterranean habits, a reduction in their size, with the adhesion of the eye-lids and growth of fur over them, might in such case be an advan* tage; and, if so, natural selection would con­ stantly aid the effects of disuse. It is well known that several animals, �LAWS OF VARIATION belonging to the most different classes, which inhabit the caves of Styria and of Kentucky are blind. In some of the crabs the foot-stalk for the eye remains, though the eye is gone ; the stand for the telescope is there, though the telescope with its glasses has been lost. As it is difficult to imagine that eyes, though useless, could be in any way injurious to animals living in darkness, I attribute their loss wholly to disuse. In one of the blind animals— namely, the cave-rat—the eyes are of immense size ; and Professor Silliman thought that it regained, after living some days in the light, some slight power of vision. In the same manner as in Madeira the wings of some of the insects have been enlarged, and the wings of others have been reduced by natural selection aided by use and disuse, so in the case of the cave­ rat natural selection seems to have struggled with the loss of light and to have increased the size of the eyes ; whereas with all the other inhabitants of the caves disuse by itself seems to have done its work. It is difficult to imagine conditions of life more similar than deep limestone caverns under a nearly similar climate ; so that, on the common view of the blind animals having been separately created for the American and European caverns, close similarity in their organisation and affini­ ties might have been expected ; but, as Schiodte and others have remarked, this is not the case, and the cave-insects of the two continents are not more closely allied than might have been anticipated from the general resemblance of the other inhabi­ tants of North America and Europe. On my view, we must suppose that American animals, having ordinary powers of vision, slowly migrated by successive generations from the outer world into the deeper and deeper recesses of the Kentucky caves, as did European animals into the caves of Europe. We have some evidence of this gradation of habit; for, as Schiodte remarks, “animals not far remote from ordinary forms prepare the transition from light to darkness. Next follow those that are con­ structed for twilight ; and, last of all, those destined for total darkness.” By the time that an animal had reached, after number­ less generations, the deepest recesses, disuse will on this view have more or less perfectly obliterated its eyes, and natural selection will often have effected other changes, such as an increase in the length of the antennae or palpi, as a compensa­ 61 tion for blindness. Notwithstanding such modifications, we might expect still to see in the cave-animals of America affinities to the other inhabitants of that continent, and in those of Europe to the inhabitants of the European continent. And this is the case with some of the American cave­ animals, as I hear from Professor Dana ; and some of the European cave-insects are very closely allied to those of the surround­ ing country. It would be most difficult to give any rational explanation of the affinities of the blind cave-animals to the other inhabitants of the two continents on the ordinary view of their independent creation. That several of the inhabitants of the caves of the Old and the New Worlds should be closely related we might expect from the well-known relation­ ship of most of their other productions. Far from feeling any surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous, as Agassiz has remarked in regard to the blind fish, the Amblyopsis, and as is the case with the blind Proteus with reference to the reptiles of Europe, I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the inhabitants of these dark abodes will probably have been exposed. Acclimatisation.—Habit is hereditary with plants, as in the period of flowering, in the amount of rain requisite for seeds to germinate, in the time of sleep, etc.; and this leads me to say a few words on acclimatisation. As it is extremely common for species of the same genus to inhabit very hot and very cold countries, and as I believe that all the species of the same genus have descended from a single . parent, if this view be correct, acclimati­ sation must be readily effected during longcontinued descent. It is notorious that each species is adapted to the climate of its own home : species from an arctic, or even from a temperate, region cannot endure a tropical climate, or conversely. So, again, many succulent plants cannot endure a damp climate. But the degree of adaptation of species to the climates under which they live is often overrated. We may infer this from our frequent in­ ability to predict whether or not an im­ ported plant will endure our climate, and from the number of plants and animals brought from warmer countries which here enjoy good health. We have reason to believe that species in a state of nature are �62 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES limited in their ranges by the competition of other organic beings quite as much as, or more than, by adaptation to particular climates. But whether or not the adapta­ tion be generally very close, we have evidence, in the case of some few plants, of their becoming, to a certain extent, naturally habituated to different tempera­ tures, or becoming acclimatised : thus the pines and rhododendrons, raised from seed collected by Dr. Hooker from trees growing at different heights on the Himalaya, were found in this country to possess different constitutional powers of resisting cold. Mr. Thwaites informs me that he has observed similar facts in Ceylon, and analo­ gous observations have been made by Mr. H. C. Watson on European species of plants brought from the Azores to England. In regard to animals, several authentic cases could be given of species within historical times having largely extended their range from warmer to cooler latitudes, and conversely ; but we do not positively know that these animals were strictly adapted to their native climate, but in all ordinary cases we assume such to be the case; nor do we know that they have subsequently become acclimatised to their new homes. As I believe that our domestic animals were originally chosen by uncivilised men because they were useful and bred readily under confinement, and not because they were subsequently found capable of farextended transportation, I think the com­ mon and extraordinary capacity in our domestic animals of not only withstanding the most different climates, but of being perfectly fertile (a far severer test) under them, may be used as an argument that a large proportion of other animals, now in a state of nature, could easily be brought to bear widely different climates. We must not, however, push the foregoing argument too far, on account of the probable origin of some of our domestic animals from several wild stocks: the blood, for instance, of a tropical and arctic wolf or wild dog may perhaps be mingled in our domestic breeds. The rat and mouse cannot be considered as domestic animals, but they have been transported by man to many parts of the world, and now have a far wider range than any other rodent, living free under the cold climate of Faroe in the north and of the Falklands in the south, and on many islands in the torrid zones. Hence I am in­ clined to look at adaptation to any special climate as a quality readily grafted on an innate wide flexibility of constitution, which is common to most animals. On this view, the capacity of enduring the most different climates by man himself and by his domes­ tic animals, and such facts as that former species of the elephant and rhinoceros were capable of enduring a glacial climate, whereas the living species are now all tropical or sub-tropical in * their habits, ought not to be looked at as anomalies, but merely as examples of a very common flexibility of constitution, brought, under peculiar circumstances, into play. How much of the acclimatisation of species to any peculiar climate is due to mere habit, and how much to the natural selection of varieties having different in­ nate constitutions, and how much to both means combined, is a very obscure ques­ tion. That habit or custom has some influence I must believe, both from analogy, and from the incessant advice giyen in agricultural works, even in the ancient En­ cyclopaedias of China, to be very cautious in transposing animals from one district to another; for it is* not likely that man should have succeeded in selecting so many breeds and sub-breeds with consti-' I tutions specially fitted for their own j districts : the result must, I think, be due i to habit. On the other hand, I can see no reason to doubt that natural selection will continually tend to preserve those indi­ viduals which are born with constituI, tions best adapted to their native countries. In treatises on many kinds of cultivated plants, certain varieties are said to with­ stand certain climates better than others : this is very strikingly shown in works on .fruit trees published in the United States, in which certain varieties are habitually recommended for the northern and others for the southern States ; and, as most of these varieties are of recent origin, they cannot owe their constitutional differences to habit. The case of the Jerusalem artichoke, which is never propagated by seed, and of which consequently new varieties have not been produced, has even been advanced—for it is now as tender as ever it was—as proving that acclimatisa­ tion cannot be effected ! The case, also of the kidney-bean has been often cited for a similar purpose, and with much greater weight; but until some one will sow, during a score of generations, his kidney­ beans so early that a very large proportion are destroyed by frost, and then collect seed from the few survivors, with care to prevent accidental crosses, and then again �LAWS OF VARIATION get seed from these seedlings, with the same precautions, the experiment cannot be said to have been even tried. Nor let it be supposed that no differences in the constitution of seedling kidney-beans ever appear, for an account has been published how much more hardy some seedlings appeared to be than others. On the whole, I think we may conclude that habit, use, and disuse have, in some cases, played a considerable part in the modification of the constitution, and of the structure of various organs ; but that the effects of use and disuse have often been largely combined with, and sometimes overmastered by, the natural selection of innate variations. Correlation of Growth.—I mean by this expression that the whole organisation is so tied together during its growth and development that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is a very impor­ tant subject, most imperfectly understood. The most obvious case is that modifications accumulated solely for the good of the young or larva will, it may safely be con­ cluded, affect the structure of the adult; in the same manner as any malconformation affecting the early embryo seriously affects the whole organisation of the adult. The several parts of the body which are homologous, and which, at an early embryonic period, are alike, seem liable to vary in an allied manner : we see this in the right and left sides of the body varying in the same manner; in the front and hind legs, and even in the jaws and limbs, varying together, for the lower jaw is believed to be homologous with the limbs. These tendencies, I do not doubt, may be mastered more or less completely by natural selection : thus a family of stags once existed with an antler only on one side ; and if this had been of any great use to the breed, it might probably have been rendered permanent by natural selection. Homologous parts, as has been remarked by some authors, tend to cohere ; this is often seen in monstrous plants; and nothing is more common than the union of homologous parts in normal structures, as the union of the petals of the corolla into a tube. Hard parts seem to affect the form of adjoining soft parts ; it is believed by some authors that the diversity in the shape of the pelvis in birds causes the remarkable diversity in the shape of their kidneys. Others believe that the shape of the pelvis in the human mother influences by pressure the shape of the head of the child. In snakes, according to Schlegel, the shape of the body and the manner of swallowing determine the position of several of the most important viscera. The nature of the bond of correlation is very frequently quite obscure. M. Is. Geoffroy St. Hilaire has forcibly remarked that certain malconformations very fre­ quently, and that others rarely, coexist, without our being able to assign any reason. What can be more singular than the relation between blue eyes and deafness in cats, and the tortoise-shell colour with the female sex ; the feathered feet and skin between the outer toes in pigeons, and the presence of more or less down on the young birds when first hatched, with the future colour of their plumage ; or, again, the relation between the hair and teeth in the naked Turkish dog, though here pro­ bably homology comes into play ? With respect to this latter case of correlation, I think it can hardly be accidental, that if we pick out the two orders of mammalia which are most abnormal in their dermal covering, viz. Cetacea (whales) apd Edentata (armadilloes, scaly ant-eaters, etc.), that these are likewise the most abnormal in their teeth. I know of no case better adapted to show the importance of the laws of correlation in modifying important structures, inde­ pendently of utility and, therefore, of natural selection, than that of the difference be* tween the outer and inner flowers in some Compositous and Umbelliferous plants. Every one knows the difference in the ray and central florets of, for instance, the daisy; and this difference is often accom­ panied with the abortion of parts of the flower. But in some Compositous plants the seeds also differ in shape and sculpture; and even the ovary itself, with its accessory parts, differs, as has been described by Cassini. These differences have been at­ tributed by some authors to pressure, and the shape of the seeds in the ray-florets in some Compositae countenances this idea; but in the case of the corolla of the Umbelliferse it is by no means, as Dr. Hooker informs me, in species with the densest heads that the inner and outer flowers most frequently differ. It might have been thought that the development of the ray­ petals by drawing nourishment from certain other parts of the flower had caused their abortion ; but in some Compositae there is I a difference in the seeds of the outer and �64 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES inner florets without any difference in the corolla. Possibly, these several differences may be connected with some difference in the flow of nutriment towards the central and external flowers ; we know, at least, that in irregular flowers those nearest to the axis are oftenest subject to peloria, and become regular. I may add, as an instance of this and of a striking case of correlation, that I have recently observed in some garden pelargoniums that the central flower of the truss often loses the patches of darker colour in the two upper petals ; and that when this occurs the adherent nectary is quite aborted ; when the colour is absent from only one of the two upper petals, the nectary is only much shortened.With respect to the difference in the corolla of the central and exterior flowers of a head or umbel, I do not feel at all sure that C. C. Sprengel’s idea, that the ray­ florets serve to attract insects whose agency is highly advantageous in the fertilisation of plants of these two orders, is so far­ fetched as it may at first appear ; and if it be advantageous, natural selection might have come into play. But in regard to the differences both in the internal and external structure of the seeds which are not always correlated with any differences in the flowers, it seems impossible that they can be in any way advantageous to, the plant ; yet in the Umbellifeme these differences are of such apparent importance—the seeds being in some cases, according to Tausch, orthospermous in the exterior flowers and ccelospermous in the central flowers—that the elder De Candolle founded his main divi­ sions of the order on analogous differences. Hence we see that modifications of struc­ ture, viewed by systematists as of high value, may be wholly due to unknown laws of correlated growth, and without being, as far as we can see, of the slightest service to the species. We may often falsely attribute to cor­ relation of growth structures which are common to whole groups of species, and which in truth are simplydue to inheritance ; for an ancient progenitor may have ac­ quired through natural selection some one modification in structure, and, after thousands of generations, some other and independent modification ; and these two modifications, having been transmitted to a whole group of descendants with diverse habits, would naturally be thought to be correlated in some necessary manner. So, again, I do not doubt that some apparent correlations, occurring throughout whole orders, are entirely due to the manner alone in which natural selection can act. For instance, Alph. De Candolle has remarked that winged seeds are never found in fruits which do not open : I shall explain the rule by the fact that seeds could not gradually become winged through natural selection, except in fruits which opened ; so that the individual plants producing seeds which were a little better fitted to be wafted further might get an advantage over those producing seed less fitted for dispersal ; and this process could not possibly go on in fruit which did not open. The elder Geoffroy and Goethe pro­ pounded, at about the same period, their law of compensation or balancement of growth ; or, as Goethe expressed it, “ in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side.” I think this holds true to a certain extent with our domestic productions : if nourish­ mentflows to one part or organ in excess, it rarely flows, at least in excess, to another part ; thus it is difficult to get a cow to give much milk and to fatten readily. The same varieties of the cabbage do not yield abundant and nutritious foliage and a copious supply of oil-bearing seeds. When the seeds in our fruits become atrophied, the fruit itself gains largely in size and quality. In our poultry a large tuft of feathers on the head is generally accom­ panied by a diminished comb, and a large beard by diminished wattles. With species in a state of nature it can hardly be maintained that the law is of universal application ; but many good observers, more especially botanists, believe in its truth. I will not, however, here give any instances, for I see hardly any way of distinguishing between the effects, on the one hand, of a part being largely developed through aatural selection and another and adjoining part being reduced by this same process or by disuse, and, on the other hand, the actual withdrawal of nutriment from one part owing to the excess of growth in another and adjoining part. I suspect, also, that some of the cases of compensation which have been advanced, and likewise some other facts, may be merged under a more general principle— namely, that natural selection is continu­ ally trying to economise in every part of the organisation. If under changed condi­ tions of life a structure before useful becomes less useful, any diminution, how­ ever slight, in its development, will be �LA WS OF VARIA TION seized on by natural selection, for it will profit the individual not to have its nutri­ ment wasted in building up a useless structure. I can thus only understand a fact with which I was much struck when examining cirripedes, and of which many other instances could be given—namely, that when a cirripede is parasitic within another, and is thus protected, it loses more or less completely its own shell or carapace. This is the case with the male Ibla, and in a truly extraordinary manner with the Proteolepas ; for the carapace in all other cirripedes consists of the three highlyimportant anterior segments of the head enormously developed and furnished with great nerves and muscles ; but in the parasitic and protected Proteolepas the whole anterior part of the head is reduced to the merest rudiment attached to the basis of the prehensile antennae. Now, the saving of a large and complex structure, when rendered superfluous by the parasitic habits of the Proteolepas, though effected by slow steps, would be a decided advantage to each successive individual of the species; for in the struggle for life to which every animal is exposed each individual Proteolepas would have a better chance of supporting itself, by less nutriment being wasted in develop­ ing a structure now become useless. Thus, as I believe, natural selection will always succeed in the long run in reducing and saving every part of the organisation, as soon as it is rendered superfluous, without by any means causing some other part to be largely developed in a corre­ sponding degree. And, conversely, that natural selection may perfectly well suc­ ceed in largely developing any organ, without requiring as a necessary com­ pensation the reduction of some adjoining part. It seems to be a rule, as remarked by Is. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, both in varieties and in species, that when any part or organ is repeated many times in the struc­ ture of the same individual (as the vertebrae in snakes and the stamens in polyandrous flowers) the number is variable ; whereas the number of the same part or organ, when it occurs in lesser numbers, is con­ stant. The same author and some botanists have further remarked that multiple parts are also very liable to variation in structure. Inasmuch as this “vegetative repetition,” to use Professor Owen’s expression, seems to be a sign of low organisation, the fore­ going remark seems connected with the 65 very general opinion of naturalists, that beings low in the scale of nature are more variable than those which are higher. I presume that lowness in this case means that the several parts of the organisation have been but little specialised for par­ ticular functions ; and as long as the same part has to perform diversified work, we can perhaps see why it should remain variable—that is, why natural selection should have preserved or rejected each little deviation of form less carefully than when the part has to serve for one special purpose alone—in the same way that a knife which has to cut all sorts of things may be almost any shape ; while a tool for some particular object had better be of some particular shape. Natural selection, it should never be forgotten, can act on each part of each being solely through and for its advantage. Rudimentary parts, it has been stated by some authors, and I believe with truth, are apt to be highly variable. We shall have to recur to the general subject of rudimentary and aborted organs ; and I will here only add that their variability seems to be owing to their uselessness, and therefore to natural selection having no power to check deviations in their structure. Thus rudimentary parts are left to the free play of the various laws of growth, to the effects of long-continued disuse, and to the tendency to reversion. A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner, in com­ parison with the same part in allied species, tends to be highly variable.—Several years ago I was much struck with a .remark, nearly to the above effect, published by Mr. Waterhouse. I infer also from an observation made by Professor Owen, with respect to the length of the arms of the ourang-outang, that he has come to a nearly similar conclusion. It is hopeless to attempt to convince any one of the truth of this proposition without giving the long array of facts which I have collected, and which cannot possibly be here introduced. I can only state my conviction that it is a rule of high gene­ rality. I am aware of several causes of error, but I hope that I have made due allowance for them. It should be under­ stood that the rule by no means applies to any part, however unusually developed, unless it be unusually developed in com­ parison with the same part in closely-allied species. Thus, the bat’s wing is a most �66 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES abnormal structure in the class mammalia; but the rule would not here apply, because there is a whole group of bats having wings ; it would apply only if some one species of bat had its wings developed in some remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus. The rule applies very strongly in the case of secondary sexual characters, when dis­ played in any unusual manner. The term, secondary sexual characters, used by Hunter, applies to characters which are attached to one sex, but are not directly connected with the act of reproduction. The rule applies to males and females ; but as females more rarely offer remarkable secondary sexual characters, it applies more rarely to them. The rule being so plainly applicable in the case of secondary sexual characters may be due to the great variability of these characters, whether or not displayed in any unusual manner—ot which fact I think there can be little doubt. But that our rule is not confined to secondary sexual characters is clearly shown in the case of hermaphrodite cirripedes ; and I may here add that I particularly attended to Mr. Waterhouse’s remark, while investigating this Order, and I am fully convinced that the rule almost invariably holds good with cirripedes. I shall, in my future work, give a list of the more remarkable cases ; I will here only briefly give one, as it illus­ trates the rule in its largest application. The opercular valves of sessile cirripedes (rock barnacles) are, in every sense of the word, very important structures, and they differ extremely little even in different genera; but in the several species of one genus, Pyrgoma, these valves present a marvellous amount of diversification, the homologous valves in the different species being sometimes wholly unlike in shape ; and the amount of variation in the indi­ viduals of several of the species is so great that it is no exaggeration to state that the varieties differ more from each other in the characters of these important valves than do other species of distinct genera. As birds within the sam.e country vary in a remarkably small degree, I have particularly attended to them, and the rule seems to me certainly to hold good in this class. I cannot make out that it applies to plants, and this would seriously have shaken my belief in its truth, had not the great variability in plants made it par­ ticularly difficult to compare their relative degrees of variability. When we see any part or organ developed in a remarkable degree or manner in any species, the fair presump­ tion is that it is of high importance to that species ; nevertheless, the part in this case is eminently liable to variation. Why should this be so ? On the view that each species has been independently created, with all its parts as we now see them, I can see no explanation. But on the view that groups of species have descended from other species, and have been modified through natural selection, I think we can obtain some light. In our domestic animals, if any part, or the whole animal, be neglected, and no selection be applied, that part (for instance, the comb in the Dorking fowl) or the whole breed will cease to have a nearly uniform character. The breed will then be said to have degenerated. In rudimentary organs, and in those which have been but little specialised for any particular purpose, and perhaps in polymorphic groups, we see a nearly parallel natural case ; for in such cases natural selection either has not or cannot come into full play, and thus the organisation is left in a fluctuating con­ dition. But what here more especially concerns us is that in our domestic animals those points, which at the present time are undergoing rapid change by continued selection, are also eminently liable to variation. Look at the breeds of the pigeon ; see what a prodigious amount of difference there is in the beak of the different tumblers, in the beak and wattle of the different carriers, in the carriage and tail of our fantails, etc., these being the points now mainly attended to by English fanciers. Even in the sub-breeds, as in the short-faced tumbler, it is notoriously difficult to breed them nearly to perfection, and frequently individuals are born which depart widely from the standard. There may be truly said to be a constant struggle going on between, on the one hand, the tendency to reversion to a less modified state, as well as an innate tendency to further variability of all kinds ; and, on the other hand, the power of steady selection to keep the breed true. In the long run selection gains the day, and we do not expect to fail so far as to breed a bird as coarse as a common tumbler from a good short-faced strain. But as long as selec­ tion is rapidly going on there may always be expected to be much variability in the structure undergoing modification. It further deserves notice that these variable �LAWS OF VARIATION characters, produced by man’s selection, sometimes become attached, from causes quite unknown to us, more to one sex than to the other, generally to the male sex, as with the wattle of carriers and the enlarged crop of pouters. Now let us turn to nature. When a part has been developed in an extraordinary manner in any one species, compared with the other species of the same genus, we may conclude that this part has undergone an extraordinary amount of modification since the period when the species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus. This period will seldom be remote in any extreme degree, as species very rarely endure for more than one geological period. An extraordinary amount of modification impliesan unusually large and long-continued amount of variability, which has continually been accumulated by natural selection for the benefit of the species. But as the variability of the extraordinarily-developed part or organ has been so great and long-continued within a period not excessively remote, we might, as a general rule, expect still to find more variability in such parts than in other parts of the organisation which have remained for a much longer period nearly constant. And this, I am convinced, is the case. That the struggle between natural selection on the one hand, and the tendency to reversion and variability on the other hand, will, in the course of time, cease, and that the most abnormally developed organs may be made constant, I can see no reason to doubt. Hence when an organ, however abnormal it may be, has been transmitted in approximately the same condition to many modified descendants, as in the case of the wing of the bat, it must have existed, according to my theory, for an immense period in nearly the same state ; and thus it comes to be no more variable than any other structure. It is only in those cases in which the modification has been com­ paratively recent and extraordinarily great that we ought to find the generative variability, as it may be called, still present in a high degree. For in this case the variability will seldom as yet have been fixed by the continued selection of the individuals varying in the required manner and degree, and by the continued rejection of those tending to revert to a former and less modified condition. The principle included in these remarks may be extended. .It is notorious that 67 specific characters are more variable than generic. To explain by a simple example what is meant. If some species in a large genus of plants had blue flowers and some had red, the colour would be only a specific character, and no one would be surprised at one of the blue species varying into red, or conversely; but if all the species had blue flowers, the colour would become a generic character, and its variation would be a more unusual circumstance. I have chosen this example because an explana­ tion is not in this case applicable, which most naturalists would advance—namely, that specific characters are more variable than generic, because they are taken from parts of less physiological importance than those commonly used for classing genera. I believe this explanation is partly, yet only indirectly, true ; I shall, however, have to return to this subject in our chapter on Classification. It would be almost superfluous to adduce evidence in support of the above statement, that specific characters are more variable than generic ; but I have repeatedly noticed in works on natural history that when an author has remarked with surprise that some impor­ tant organ or part which is generally very constant throughout large groups of species has differed considerably in closely-allied species, that it has also been variable in the individuals of some of the species. And this fact shows that a character’ which is generally of generic value, when it sinks in value and becomes only of specific value, often becomes variable, though its physiological impor­ tance may remain the same. Something of the same kind applies to monstrosities: at least Is. Geoffroy St. Hilaire seems to entertain no doubt that the more an organ normally differs -in the different species of the same group, the more subject it is to individual anomalies. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, why should that part of the structure which differs from the same part in other inde­ pendently-created species of the same genus be more variable than those parts, which are closely alike in the several species ? I do not see that any explanation can be given. But on the view of species being only strongly marked • and fixed varieties, we might surely expect to find them still often continuing to vary in those parts of their structure which have varied within a moderately recent period, and which have thus come to differ. Or to �68 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES state the case in another manner: The ' readily have succeeded in giving to the species of the same group a greater points in which all the species of a genus amount of difference in their sexual char­ resemble each other, and in which they differ from the species of some other genus, j acters than in other parts of their structure. It is a remarkable fact that the secondary are called generic characters ; and these characters in common I attribute to in­ sexual differences between the two sexes of the same species are generally displayed in heritance from a common progenitor, for it can rarely have happened that natural | the very same parts of the organisation in which the different species of the same selection will have modified several species, genus differ from each other. Of this fact fitted to more or less widely-different I will give in illustration two instances, the habits, in exactly the same manner; and first which happen to stand on my list; and as these so-called generic characters have as the differences in these cases are of been inherited from a remote period—since a very unusual nature, the relation can that period when the species first branched hardly be accidental. The same number •off from their common progenitor—and of joints in the tarsi is a character generally subsequently have not varied or come to common to very large groups of beetles, differ in any degree, or only in a slight but in the Engidae, as West wood has degree, it is not probable that they should remarked, the number varies greatly ; and vary at the present day. On the other hand, the number likewise differs in the two the points in which species differ from sexes of the same species. Again in fossorial other species of the same genus are called hymenoptera, the manner of neuration of specific characters; and as these specific the wings is a character of the highest characters have varied and come to differ within the period of the branching-off importance, because common to large groups; but in certain genera the neuration of the species from a common progenitor, differs in the different species, and likewise it is probable that they should still often be in the two sexes of the same species. in some degree variable—at least more variable than those parts of the organi­ This relation has a clear meaning on my view of the subject: I look at all the species sation which have for a very long period of the same genus as having as certainly remained constant. descended from the same progenitor as In connection with the present subject, I will make only two other remarks. I think have the two sexes of any one of the species. Consequently, whatever part of it will be admitted, without my entering on the structure of the common progenitor, or details, that secondary sexual characters of its early descendants, became variable ; are very variable; I think it also will variations of this part would, it is highly be admitted that species of the same group probable, be taken advantage of by natural differ from each other more widely in and sexual selection, in order to fit the their secondary sexual characters than in several species to their several places in other parts of their organisation. Compare, the economy of nature, and likewise to fit for instance, the amount of difference the two sexes of the same species to each between the males of galinaceous birds, in other, or to fit the males and females to which secondary sexual characters are strongly displayed, with the amount of different habits of life, or the males to struggle with other males for the possession difference between their females ; and the of the females. truth of this proposition will be granted. Finally, then, I conclude that the greater The cause of the original variability of variability of specific characters, or those secondary sexual characters is not mani­ which distinguish species from species, fest; but we can see why these characters should not have been rendered as constant than of generic characters, or those which and uniform as other parts of the organi­ the species possess in common—that the frequent extreme variability of any part sation, for secondary sexual characters which is developed in a species in an have been accumulated by sexual selection, extraordinary manner in comparison with which is less rigid in its action than the same part in its congeners ; and the ordinary selection, as it does not entail slight degree of variability in a part, how­ death, but only gives fewer offspring to ever extraordinarily it may be developed, the less favoured males. Whatever the if it be common to a whole group of cause may be of the variability of secondary species; that the great variability of sexual characters, as they are highly secondary sexual characters, and the great variable, sexual selection will have had amount of difference in these same a wide scope for action, and may thus �LA IVS OF VARIA TION characters between closely-allied species ; that secondary sexual and ordinary specific differences are generally displayed in the same parts of the organisation—are all principles closely connected together. All being mainly due to the species of the same group having descended from a common progenitor, from whom they have inherited much in common—to parts which have recently and largely varied being more likely still to go on varying than parts which have long been inherited and have not varied—to natural selection having more or less completely, according to the lapse of time, overmastered the tendency to reversion and to further variability—to sexual selection being less rigid than ordinary selection—and to variations in the same parts having been accumulated by natural and sexual selec­ tion, and having been thus adapted for secondary sexual and for ordinary specific purposes. Distinct species present analogous varia­ tions ; and a variety of one species often assumes some of the characters of an allied species, or reverts to some of the characters of an early progenitor.—These proposi­ tions will be most readily understood by looking to our domestic races. The most distinct breeds of pigeons, in countries most widely apart, present sub-varieties with reversed feathers on the head and feathers on the feet—characters not possessed by the aboriginal rock-pigeon ; these, then, are analogous variations in two or more distinct races. The frequent presence of fourteen or even sixteen tail­ feathers in the pouter may be considered as a variation representing the normal structure of another race, the fantail. I presume that no one will doubt that all such analogous variations are due to the several races of the pigeon having inherited from a common parent the same constitutution and tendency to variation, when acted on by similar unknown influences. In the vegetable kingdom we have a case of analogous variation, in the enlarged stems, or roots as commonly called, of the Swedish turnip and Ruta baga, plants which several botanists rank as varieties produced by cultivation from a common parent : if this be not so, the case will then be one of analogous variation in two so-called distinct species ; and to these a third may be added—namely, the common turnip. According to the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we should have to attribute this similarity in the enlarged stems of these three plants, not to the ver a causa of com­ munity of descent, and a consequent ten­ dency to vary in a like manner, but to three separate yet closely related acts of creation. With pigeons, however, we have another case—namely, the occasional appearance in all the breeds, of slaty-blue birds with two black bars on the wings, a white rump, a bar at the end of the tail, with the outer feathers externally edged near their bases with white. As all these marks are characteristic of the parent rock-pigeon, I presume that no one will doubt that this is a case of reversion, and not of a new yet analogous variation appearing in the several breeds. We may, I think, confidently come to this conclusion, because, as we have seen, these coloured marks are eminently liable to appear in the crossed offspring of two distinct and differently coloured breeds; and in this case there is nothing in the external conditions of life to cause the reappearance of the slaty-blue, with the several marks, beyond the influence of the mere act of crossing on the laws of inheritance. No doubt it is a very surprising fact that characters should reappear after having been lost for many, perhaps for hundreds of generations. But when a breed has been crossed only once by some other breeds, the offspring occasionally show a tendency to revert in character to the foreign breed for many generations—some say, for a dozen or even a score of generations. After twelve generations the proportion of blood, to use a common expression, of any one ancestor is only i in 2048 ; and yet, as we see, it isgenerally believed that a tendency to re­ version is retained by this very small proportion of foreign blood. In a breed which has not been crossed, but in which « both parents have lost some character which their progenitor possessed, the tendency, whether strong or weak, to reproduce the lost character might be, as was formerly remarked, for all that we can see to the contrary, transmitted for almost any number of generations. When a character which has been lost in a breed reappears after a great number of genera­ tions, the most probable hypothesis is, not that the offspring suddenly takes after an ancestor some hundred generations distant, but that in each successive genera­ tion there has been a tendency to repro­ duce the character in question, which at �7o r» ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES last, under unknown favourable conditions, what are new but analogous variations, gains an ascendancy. For instance, it yet we ought, on my theory, sometimes to is probable that in each generation of the find the varying offspring of a species barb-pigeon, which produces most rarely assuming characters (either from reversion -a blue and black-barred bird, there has or from analogous variation) which already been a tendency in each generation in the occur in some other members of the same plumage to assume this colour. This view group. And this undoubtedly is the case is hypothetical, but could be supported in nature. by some facts ; and I can see no more A considerable part of the difficulty in abstract improbability in a tendency to recognising a variable species in our produce any character being inherited for systematic works is due to its varieties an endless number of generations than in mocking, as it were, some of the quite useless or rudimentary organs being, other species of the same genus. A con­ as we all know them to be, thus inherited. siderable catalogue, also, could be given of Indeed, we may sometimes observe a mere forms intermediate between two other tendency to produce a rudiment inherited ; forms, which themselves must be doubt­ for instance, in the common snap-dragon fully ranked as either varieties or species ; (Antirrhinum) a rudiment of a fifth stamen and this shows, unless all these forms be so often appears that this plant must have considered as independently created an inherited tendency to produce it. species, that the one in varying has As all the species of the same genus are assumed some of the characters of the supposed, on my theory, to have descended other, so as to produce the intermediate from a common parent, it might be ex­ form. But the best evidence is afforded by pected that they would occasionally vary parts or organs of an important and in an analogous manner ; so that a variety uniform nature occasionally varying so as of one species would resemble in some to acquire, in some degree, the character of its characters another species; this of the same part or organ in an allied other species being on my view only a species. I have collected a long list of well-marked and permanent variety. But such cases ; but here, as before, I lie under characters thus gained would probably be a great disadvantage in not being able to • of an unimportant nature, for the presence give them. I can only repeat that such of all important characters will be governed cases certainly do occur, and seem to me by natural selection, in accordance with very remarkable. the diverse habits of the species, and will I will, however, give one curious and not be left to the mutual action of the complex case, not indeed as affecting any conditions of life and of a similar inherited ; important character, but from occurring in constitution. It might further be expected i several species of the same genus, partly that the species of the same genus would under domestication and partly under occasionally exhibit reversions to lost an­ nature. It is a case apparently of rever­ cestral characters. As", however, we never sion. The ass not rarely has very distinct know the exact character of the common transverse bars on its legs, like those on ancestor of a group, we could not dis­ the legs of the zebra : it has been asserted tinguish these two cases : if, for instance, that these are plainest in the foal, and, from we did not know that the rock-pigeon was inquiries which I have made, I believe not feather-footed or turn-crowned, we this to be true. It has also been asserted could not have told whether these char­ that the stripe on each shoulder is some­ acters in our domestic breeds were revertimes double. The shoulder-stripe is -sions or only analogous variations ; but certainly very variable in length and out­ we might have inferred that the blueness line. A white ass, but not an albino, has was a case of reversion, from the number been described without either spinal or of the markings, which are correlated with shoulder stripe ; and these stripes are the blue tint, and which it does not appear sometimes very obscure, or actually quite probable would all appear together from lost, in dark-coloured asses. The koulan simple variation. More especially we of Pallas is said to have been seen with a might have inferred this, from the blue double shoulder-stripe. The hemionus has colour and marks so often appearing when no shoulder-stripe ; but traces of it, as distinct breeds of diverse colours are crossed. stated by Mr. Blyth and others, occasion­ Hence, though under nature it must gene­ ally appear : and I have been informed by rally be left doubtful what cases are rever­ Colonel Poole that the foals of this species sions to an anciently existing character, and are generally striped on the legs, and �LAWS OF VARIATION faintly on the shoulder. The quagga, though so plainly barred like a zebra over the body, is without bars on the legs ; but Dr. Gray has figured one specimen with very distinct zebra-like bars on the hocks. With respect to the horse, I have col­ lected cases in England of the spinal stripe in horses of the most distinct breeds, and of all colours ; transverse bars on the legs are not rare in duns, mouse-duns, and in one instance in a chestnut : a faint shoulder-stripe may sometimes be seen in duns, and I have seen a trace in a bay horse. My son made a careful examina­ tion and sketch for me of a dun Belgian cart-horse with a double stripe on each shoulder and with leg-stripes ; and a man whom I can implicitly trust has examined for me a small dun Welch pony with three short parallel stripes on each shoulder. In the north-west part of India the Kattywar breed of horses is so generally striped that, as I hear from Colonel Poole, who examined the breed for the Indian Government, a horse without stripes is not considered as purely-bred. The spine is always striped; the legs are generally barred ; and the shoulder-stripe, which is sometimes double and sometimes treble, is common ; the side of the face, moreover, is sometimes striped.' The stripes are plainest in the foal ; and sometimes quite disappear in old horses. Colonel Poole has seen both gray and bay Kattywar horses striped when first foaled. I have, also, reason to suspect, from information given me by Mr. W. W. Edwards, that with the English race-horse the spinal stripe is much commoner in the foal than in the full-grown animal. Without here entering on further details, I may state that I have collected cases of leg and shoulder stripes in horses of very different breeds, in various countries from Britain to Eastern China; and from Norway in the north to the Malay Archipelago in the south. In all parts of the world these stripes occur far oftenest in duns and mouse-duns ; by the term dun a large range of colour is included, from one between brown and black to a close ap­ proach to cream-colour. I am aware that Colonel Hamilton Smith, who has written on this subject, believes that the several breeds of the horse have descended from several abo­ riginal species—one of which, the dun, was striped ; and that the above-described appearances are all due to ancient crosses with the dun stock. But I am not at all 7i satisfied with this theory, and should be loth to apply it to breeds so distinct as the heavy Belgian cart-horse, Welsh ponies, cobs, the lanky Kattywar race, etc., in­ habiting the most distant parts of the world. Now let us turn to the effects of crossing the several species of the horse-genus. Rollin asserts that the common mule from the ass and horse is particularly apt to have bars on its legs : according to Mr. Gosse, in certain parts of the United States about nine out of ten mules have striped legs. I once saw a mule with its legs so much striped that anyone would at first have thought that it must have been the product of a zebra; and Mr. W. C. Martin, in his excellent treatise on the horse, has given a figure of a similar mule. In four coloured drawings, which I have seen, of hybrids between the ass and zebra, the legs were much more plainly barred than the rest of the body ; and in one of them there was a double shoulder-stripe. In Lord Morton’s famous hybrid from a chestnut mare and male quagga, the hybrid, and even the pure offspring sub­ sequently produced from the mare by a black Arabian sire, were much more plainly barred across the legs than is even the pure quagga. Lastly, and this is another most remarkable case, a hybrid has been figured by Dr. Gray (and he informs me that he knows of a second case) from the ass- and the hemionus; and this hybrid, though the ass seldom has stripes on his legs and the hemionus has none, and has not even a shoulder­ stripe, nevertheless had all four legs barred, and had three short shoulder-stripes like those on the dun Welsh pony, and even had some zebra-like stripes on the sides of its face. With respect to this last fact I was so convinced that not even a stripe of colour appears from what would com­ monly be called an accident that I was led, solely from the occurrence of the face­ stripes on this hybrid from the ass and hemionus, to ask Colonel Poole whether such face-stripes 'ever occur in the emi­ nently striped Kattywar breed of horses, and was, as we have seen, answered in the affirmative. What now are we to say to these several facts? We see several very distinct species of the horse-genus becoming, by simple variation, striped on the legs like a zebra, or striped on the shoulders like an ass. In the horse we see this tendency strong whenever a dun tint appears—a tint which �7.2 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES approaches to that of the general colouring of the other species of the genus. The appearance of the stripes is not accom­ panied by any change of form or by any other new character. We see this tendency to become striped most strongly displayed in hybrids from between several of the most distinct species. Now observe the case of the several breeds of pigeons : they are descended from a pigeon (in­ cluding two or three sub-species or geo­ graphical races) of a bluish colour, with certain bars and other marks ; and when any breed assumes by simple variation a bluish tint, these bars and other marks invariably reappear, but without any other change of form or character. When the oldest and truest breeds of various colours are crossed, we see a strong tendency for the blue tint and bars and marks to re­ appear in the mongrels. I have stated that the most probable hypothesis to account for the reappearance of very ancient characters is—that there is a tendency in the young of each successive generation to produce the long-lost char­ acter, and that this tendency, from unknown causes, sometimes prevails. And we have just seen that in several species of the horse-genus the stripes are either plainer or appear more commonly in the young than in the old. Call the breeds of pigeons, some of which have bred true for centuries, species; and how exactly parallel is the case with that of the species of the horse-genus' For myself, I venture confidently to look back thousands on thousands of generations, and I see an animal striped like a zebra, but perhaps otherwise very differently con­ structed, the common parent of our domestic horse, whether or not it be descended from one or more wild stocks, of the ass, the hemionus, quagga, and zebra. He who believes that each equine species was independently created will, I presume, assert that each species has been created, with a tendencyato vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus ; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting dis­ tant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and decep­ tion ; I would almost as soon believe, with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore. Summary.—Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part differs, more or less, from the same part in the parents. Bnt whenever we have the means of insti­ tuting a comparison the same laws appear to have acted in producing the lesser dif­ ferences between varieties of the same species, and the greater differences between species of the same genus. The external conditions of life, as climate and food, etc., seem to have induced some slight modifica­ tions. Habit in producing constitutional differences, and use in strengthening and disuse in weakening and diminishing organs, seem to have been more potent in their effects. Homologous parts tend to vary in the same way, and homologous parts tend to cohere. Modifications in hard parts and in external parts sometimes affect softer and internal parts. When one part is largely developed, perhaps it tends to draw nourishment from the adjoining parts ; and every part of the structure which can be saved without detriment to the indi­ vidual will be saved. Changes of structure at an early age will generally affect parts subsequently developed; and there are very many other correlations of growth, the nature of which we are utterly unable to understand. Multiple parts are variable in number and in structure, perhaps arising from such parts not having been closely specialised to any particular function, so that their modifications have not been closely checked by natural selection. It is probably from this same cause that organic beings low in the scale of nature are more variable than those which have their whole organisation more specialised, and are higher in the scale. Rudimentary organs, from being useless, will be disregarded by natural selection, and hence probably are variable. Specific characters—that is, the characters which have come to differ since the several species of the same genus branched off from a common parent—are more variable than generic characters, or those which have long been inherited, and have not differed within this same period. In these remarks we have referred to special parts or organs being still variable, because they have recently varied and thus come to differ ; but we have also seen �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY in the second chapter that the same principle applies to the whole individual ; for in a district where many species of any genus are found—that is, where there has been much former variation and differen­ tiation, or where the manufactory of new specific forms has been actively at work—• there, on an average, we now find most varieties or incipient species. Secondary sexual characters are highly variable, and such characters differ much in the species of the same group. Variability in the same parts of the organisation has gener­ ally been taken advantage of in giving secondary sexual differences to the sexes of the same species, and specific differences to the several species of the same genus. Any part or organ developed to an extra­ ordinary size or in an extraordinary manner, in comparison with the same part or organ in the allied species, must have gone through an extraordinary amount of modification since the genus arose; and thus we can understand why it should often still be variable in a much higher degree than other parts ; for variation is a long-continued and slow process, and natural selection will in such cases not as yet have had time to overcome the tendency to further variability and to reversion to a less modified state. But 73 when a species with any extraordinarilydeveloped organ has become the parent of many modified descendants—which on my view must be a very slow process, requiring a long lapse of time—in this case natural selection may readily have succeeded in giving a fixed character to the organ, in however extraordinary a manner it may be developed. Species inheriting nearly the same constitution from a common parent and exposed to similar influences will naturally tend to present analogous varia­ tions, and these same species may oc­ casionally revert to some of the characters of their ancient progenitors. Although new and important modifications may not arise from reversion and analogous varia­ tion, such modifications will add to the beautiful and harmonious diversity of nature. Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents—and a cause for each must exist —it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of this earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive. Chapter VI. DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY Difficulties of the theory of descent with modi­ fication—Transitions—Absence or rarity of transitional varieties—Transitions in habits of life—Diversified habits in the same species— Species with habits widely different from those of their allies—Organs of extreme perfection— Means of transition—Cases of difficulty—Natura non facit saltum—Organs of small importance—Organs not in all cases absolutely perfect-—The law of Unity of Type and of the Conditions of Existence embraced by the theory of Natural Selection. Long before having arrived at this part of my work a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered ; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory. These difficulties and objections may be classed under the following heads :— Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see in­ numerable transitional forms ? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined ? Secondly, is it possible that an animal having, for instance, the structure and �74 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES habits of a bat, could have been formed by the modification of some animal with wholly different habits ? Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, organs of trifling importance, such as the tail of a giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and, on the other hand, organs of such wonderful structure as the eye, of which we hardly as yet fully under­ stand the inimitable perfection ? Thirdly, can instincts be acquired and modified through natural selection ? What shall we say to so marvellous an instinct as that which leads the bee to make cells, which has practically anticipated the dis­ coveries of profound mathematicians. Fourthly, how can we account for species, when crossed, being sterile and producing sterile offspring, whereas, when varieties are crossed, their fertility is unimpaired ? The two first heads shall be here dis­ cussed—Instinct and Hybridism in sepa­ rate chapters. On the absence or rarity of transitional varieties.—Ns, natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifi­ cations, each new form will tend in a fullystocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved parent or other less favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus, extinction and natural selection will, as we have seen, go hand-in-hand. Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some other unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will gene­ rally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form. But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth ? It will be much more convenient to discuss the question in th® chapter on the Imperfection of the Geological Record; and I will here only state that I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being incomparably less perfect than is generally supposed ; the imperfection of the record being chiefly due to organic beings not inhabiting pro­ found depths of the sea, and to their remains being embedded and preserved to a future age only in masses of sediment sufficiently thick and extensive to with­ stand an enormous amount of future degradation; and such' fossiliferous masses can be accumulated only where much sediment is deposited on the shallow bed of the sea while it slowly subsides. These contingencies will occur only rarely, and after enormously long intervals. While the bed of the sea is stationary or is rising, or w7hen very little sediment is being deposited, there will be blanks in our geological history. The crust of the earth is a vast museum; but the natural col­ lections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote. But it may be urged that, when several closely-allied species inhabit the same territory, we surely ought to find at the present time many transitional forms. Let us take a simple case : in travelling from north to south over a continent we gene­ rally meet at successive intervals with closely-allied or representative species, evidently filling nearly the same place in the natural economy of the land. These representative species often meet and interlock; and, as the one becomes rarer and rarer, the other becomes more and more frequent, till the one replaces the other. But if we compare these species where they intermingle, they are generally as absolutely distinct from each other in every detail of structure as are specimens taken from the metropolis in­ habited by each. By my theory these allied species have descended from a common parent; and during the process of modification each has become adapted to the conditions of life of its own region, and has supplanted and exterminated its original parent and all the transitional varieties between its past and present states. Hence we ought not to expect at the present time to meet with numerous transitional varieties in each region, though they must have existed there, and may be embedded there in a fossil condition. But in the intermediate region, having inter­ mediate conditions of life, why do wre not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties ? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me. But I think it can be in a large part explained. In the first place, we should be extremely cautious in inferring, because an area is now continuous, that it has been continuous during a long period. Geology would lead us to believe that almost every continent has been broken up into islands even during the later tertiary periods; and in such islands distinct species might have been separately formed without the possibility of intermediate varieties existing in the inter­ mediate zones.. By changes in the form of the land and of climate, marine areas now �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY continuous must often have existed within recent times in a far less continuous and uniform condition than at present. But I will pass over this way of escaping from the difficulty; for I believe that many per­ fectly defined species have been formed on strictly continuous areas, though I do not doubt that the formerly broken condition of areas now continuous has played an important part in the formation of new species, more especially with freely-crossing and wandering animals. In looking at species as they are now distributed over a wide area, we generally find them tolerably numerous over a large territory, then becoming somewhat abruptly rarer and rarer on the confines, and finally disappearing. Hence the neutral territory between two representative species is generally narrow in comparison with the territory proper to each. We see the same fact in ascending mountains, and sometimes it is quite remarkable how abruptly, as Alph. De Candolle has observed, a common alpine species disappears. The same fact has been noticed by E. Forbes in sounding the depths of the sea with the dredge. To those who look at climate and the physical conditions of life as the all - important elements of distribution, these facts ought to cause surprise, as climate and height or depth graduate away insensibly. But when we bear in mind that almost every species, even in its metropolis, would increase immensely in numbers were it not- for other competing species ; that nearly all either prey on or serve as prey for others ; in short, that each organic being is either directly or indirectly related in the most important manner to other organic beings, we must see that the range of the inhabi­ tants of any country by no' means exclu­ sively depends on insensibly changing physical conditions, but in large part on the presence of other species, on which it depends, or by which it is destroyed, or with which it comes into competition; and as these species are already defined objects (however they may have become so), not blending one into another by insensible gradations, the range of any one species, , ■ depending as it does on the range of others, will tend to be sharply defined. Moreover, each species on the confines of its range, where it exists in lessened numbers, will, during fluctuations in the number of its enemies or of its prey, or in the seasons, be extremely liable to utter extermination; and thus its geographical ra*ige will come to be still more sharply defined. 75 If I am right in believing that allied or representative species, when inhabiting a continuous area, are generally so distributed that each has a wide range, with a com­ paratively narrow neutral territory between them, in which they become rather suddenly rarer and rarer—then, as varieties do not essentially differ from species, the same rule will probably apply to both; and if we in imagination adapt a varying species to a very large area, we shall have to adapt two varieties to two large areas, and a third variety to a narrow intermediate zone. The intermediate variety, consequently, will exist in lesser numbers from inhabiting a narrow and lesser area ; and practically, as far as I can make out, this rule holds good with varieties in a state of nature. I have met with striking instances of the rule in the case of varieties intermediate between wellmarked varieties in the genus Balanus. And it would appear from information given me by Mr. Watson, Dr. Asa Gray, and Mr. Wollaston, that generally, when varieties intermediate between two other forms occur, they are much rarer numeri­ cally than the forms which they connect. Now, if we may trust these facts and inferences, and therefore conclude that varieties linking two other varieties together have generally existed in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, then, I think, we can understand why intermediate varieties should not endure for very long periods—why as a general rule they should be exterminated and disappear sooner than the forms which they originally linked together. For any form existing in lesser numbers would, as already remarked, run a greater chance of being exterminated than one existing in large numbers ; and in this particular case the intermediate form would be eminently liable to the inroads of closely-allied forms existing on both sides of it. But a far more important con­ sideration, as I believe, is that, during the process of further modification by which two varieties are supposed, on my theory, to be converted and perfected into two distinct species, the two which exist in larger numbers from inhabiting larger areas will have a great advantage over the intermediate variety which exists in smaller numbers in a narrow and intermediate zone. For forms existing in larger numbers will always have a .better chance within any given period of presenting further favourable variations for natural selection to seize on than will the rarer forms which �76 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES exist in lesser numbers. Hence the more common forms in the race for life will tend to beat and supplant the less common forms, for these will be more slowly modified and improved. It is the same principle which, as I believe, accounts for the common species in each country as shown in the second chapter, presenting on an average a greater number of wellmarked varieties than do the rarer species. I may illustrate what I mean by supposing three varieties of sheep to be kept, one adapted to an extensive mountainous region ; a second to a comparatively narrow, hilly tract ; and a third to wide plains at the base ; and that the in­ habitants are all trying with equal steadi­ ness and skill to improve their stocks by selection ; the chances in this case will be strongly in favour of the great holders on the mountains or on the plains improving their breeds more quickly than the small holders on the intermediate narrow, hilly .tract, and consequently the improved mountain or plain breed will soon take the place of the less improved hill breed; and thus the two breeds, which originally -existed in greater numbers, will come into close contact with each other without the interposition of the supplanted, interme­ diate hill variety. To sum up, I believe that species come to be tolerably well-defined objects, and do not at any one period present an in­ extricable chaos of varying and interme­ diate links: firstly, because;new varieties are very slowly formed, for variation is a very slow process, and natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur, and until a place in the natural polity of the country can be better filled by some modification of some one or more of its inhabitants. And such new places will depend on slow changes of climate, or on the occasional immigration of new in­ habitants, and, probably, in a still more important degree, on some of the old inhabitants becoming slowly modified, with the new forms thus produced and the old ones acting and re-acting on each other. So that, in any one region and at any time, we ought only to see a few species presenting slight modifications of structure in some degree permanent, and this assuredly we do see. Secondly, areas now continuous must often have existed within the recent period in isolated portions, in which many forms, more especially among the classes which unite for each birth and wander much, may have separately been rendered sufficiently distinct to rank as representative species. In this case, intermediate varieties between the several representative species and their common parent must formerly have existed in each broken portion of the land; but these links will have been supplanted and exterminated during the process of natural selection, so that they will no longer exist in a living state. Thirdly, when two or more varieties have been formed in different portions of a strictly continuous area, intermediate varieties will, it is probable, at first have been formed in the intermediate zones, but they will generally have had a short duration. For these intermediate varieties will, from reasons already as­ signed (namely, from what we know of the actual distribution of closely-allied or representative species, and likewise of acknowledged varieties), exist in the inter­ mediate zones- in lesser numbers than the varieties which they tend to connect. From this cause alone the intermediate varieties will be liable to accidental extermination; and during the process of further modi­ fication through natural selection they will almost certainly be beaten and supplanted by the forms which they connect; for these, from existing in greater numbers, will, in the aggregate, present more variation, and thus be further improved through natural selec­ tion and gain further advantages. Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all times, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent-forms and the intermediate links. Consequently, evidence of their former existence could be found only among fossil remains, which are pre­ served, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record. On the origin and transitions of organic beings with peculiar habits and structure. ■—It has been asked by the opponents of such views as I hold how, for instance, a land carnivorous animal could have been converted into one with aquatic habits; for how could the animal in its transitional state have subsisted? It would be easy to show that within the same group carni­ vorous animals exist having every inter­ mediate grade between truly aquatic and �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY strictly terrestrial habits; and, as each exists by a struggle for life, it is clear that each is well adapted in its habits to its place in nature. Look at the Mustela vison of North America, which has webbed feet, and which resembles an otter in its fur, short legs, and form of tail: during summer this animal dives for and preys on fish, but during the long winter it leaves the frozen waters, and preys, like other pole-cats, on mice and land animals. If a different case had been taken, and it had been asked how an insectivorous quadruped could possibly have been converted into a flying bat, the question would have been far more difficult, and I could have given no answer. Yet I think such difficulties have very little weight. Here, as on other occasions, I lie under a heavy disadvantage, for, out of the many striking cases which I have collected, I can give only one or two instances of transitional habits and structures in closelyallied species of the same genus, and of diversified habits, either constant or occa­ sional, in the same species. And it seems to me that nothing less than a long list of such cases is sufficient to lessen the diffi­ culty in any particular case like that of the bat. Look at the family of squirrels. Here we have the finest gradation from animals with their tails only slightly flattened, and from others, as Sir J. Richardson has re­ marked, with the posterior parts of their bodies rather w7ide and with the skin on their flanks rather full, to the so-called flying squirrels ; and flying squirrels have their limbs, and even the base of the tail, united by a broad expanse of skin, which serves as a parachute, and allows them to glide through the air, to an astonishing distance, from tree to tree. We cannot doubt that each structure is of use to each kind of squirrel in its own country by enabling it to escape birds or beasts of prey, or to collect food more quickly, or, as there is reason to believe, by lessening the danger from occasional falls. But it does not follow from this fact that the structure of each squirrel is the best that it is possible to conceive under all natural conditions. Let the climate and vegetation change, let other competing rodents or new beasts of prey immigrate, or old ones become modified, and all analogy would lead us to believe that some at least of the squirrels would decrease in numbers, or become exterminated, unless they also became modified and improved in structure 77 in a corresponding manner. Therefore, I can see no difficulty, more especially under changing conditions of life, in the con­ tinued preservation of individuals with fuller and fuller flank-membranes, each modification being useful, each being pro­ pagated, until, by the accumulated effects of this process of natural selection, a perfect so-called flying squirrel was pro­ duced. Now, look at the Galeopithecus, or flying lemur, which formerly was falsely ranked among bats. It has an extremely wide flank-membrane, stretching from the corners of the jaw to the tail, and including the limbs and the elongated fingers: the flank-membrane is also furnished with an extensor muscle. Although no graduated links of structure, fitted for gliding throughthe air, now connect the Galeopithecus with the other Lemurid;:e, yet I see no difficulty in supposing that such linksformerly existed, and that each had been formed by the same steps as in the case of the less perfectly gliding squirrels; and that each grade of structure was useful to its possessor. Nor can I see any insuper­ able difficulty in further believing it. possible that the membrane-connected fingers and fore-arm of the Galeopithecus. might be greatly lengthened by natural selection, and this, as far as the organs of flight are concerned, would convert it into a bat. In bats which have the wing­ membrane extended from the top of the shoulder to the tail, including the hind legs, we perhaps see traces of an ap­ paratus originally constructed for gliding through the air rather than for flight. If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck(Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx? Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve at least to �78 (9/V 7775 ORIGIN OF SPECIES show what diversified means of transition | probably often change almost simul­ are possible. taneously. Of cases of changed habits Seeing that a few members of such it will suffice merely to allude to that of water-breathing classes as the Crustacea the many British insects which now feed and Mollusca are adapted to live on the on exotic plants or exclusively on artificial land ; and seeing that we have flying birds substances. Of diversified habits innu­ and mammals, flyings insects of the most merable instances could be given: I have diversified types, and formerly had flying often watched a tyrant fly-catcher (Sauroreptiles, it is conceivable that flying-fish, phagus sulphuratus) in South America which now glide far through the air, hovering over one spot and then pro­ slightly rising and turning by the aid of ceeding to another like a kestrel, and at their fluttering fins, might have been other times standing stationary on the modified into perfectly winged animals. margin of water and then dashing like If this had been effected, who would have a kingfisher at a fish. In our own country ever imagined that in an early transitional the larger titmouse (Parus major) may be state they had been inhabitants of the open seen climbing branches almost like a ocean, and had used their incipient organs creeper; it often, like a shrike, kills small of flight exclusively, as far as we know, to birds by blows on the head ; and I have escape being devoured by other fish ? many times seen and heard it hammering When we see any structure highly per­ the seeds of the yew on a branch, and thus fected for any particular habit as the wings breaking them like a nuthatch. In North of a bird for flight, we should bear in mind America the black bear was seen by that animals displaying early transitional Hearne swimming for hours with widely grades of the structure will seldom continue open mouth, thus catching, almost like to exist to the present day, for they will a whale, insects in the water. have been supplanted by the very process As we sometimes see individuals of a of perfection through natural selection. species following habits widely different Furthermore, we may conclude that from those of their own species and of the transitional grades between structures other species of the same genus, we might fitted for very different habits of life will expect, on my theory, that such individuals rarely have been developed at an early would occasionally have given rise to new period in great numbers and under many species, having anomalous habits, and with subordinate forms. Thus, to return to our their structure either slightly or con­ imaginary illustration of the flying-fish, it siderably modified from that of their does not seem probable that fishes capable proper type. And such instances do occur of true flight would have been developed in nature. Can a more striking instance under many subordinate forms, for taking of adaptation be given than that of a prey of many kinds in many ways, on the woodpecker for climbing trees, and for land and in the water, until their organs of seizing insects in the chinks of the bark ? flight had come to a high stage of perfec­ Yet in North America there are wood­ tion, so as to have given them a decided peckers which feed largely on fruit, and advantage over other animals in the battle others with elongated wings which chase of life. Hence the chance of discovering insects on the wing; and on the plains of species with transitional grades of structure La Plata, where not a tree grows, there in a fossil condition will always be less, is a woodpecker which, in every essential from their having existed in lesser numbers part of its organisation, even in its colouring, than in the case of species with fullyin the harsh tone of its voice and unduladeveloped structures. tory flight, told me plainly of its close blood­ I will now give two or three instances of relationship to our common species; yet it is diversified and of changed habits in the a woodpecker which never climbs a tree 1 individuals of the same species. When Petrels are the most aerial and oceanic either case occurs, it would be easy for of birds, yet in the quiet Sounds of Tierra natural selection to fit the animal, by some del Fuego the Puffinuria berardi, in its modification of its structure, for its changed general habits, in its astonishing power habits, or exclusively for one of its several of diving, its manner of swimming, and different habits. But it is difficult to tell, of flying when unwillingly it takes flight, and immaterial for us, whether habits would be mistaken by anyone for an auk generally change first and structure after­ or grebe; nevertheless, it is essentially a wards ; or whether slight modifications of petrel, but with many parts of its organi­ structure lead to changed habits ; both sation profoundly modified. On the other �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY 79 hand, the acutest observer, by examining be diving thrushes and petrels with the the dead body of the water-ouzel, would habits of auks. never have suspected its sub-aquatic habits; ‘ yet this anomalous member of the strictly Organs of extreme perfection and com­ terrestrial thrush family wholly subsists by plication.—To suppose that the eye, with all diving—grasping the stones with its feet its inimitable contrivances for adjusting and using its wings under water. the focus to different distances, for admit­ He who believes that each being has ting different amounts of light, and for the been created as we now see it must occa­ correction of spherical and chromatic sionally have felt surprise when he has aberration, could have been formed by met with an animal having habits and natural selection, seems, I freely confess, structure not at all in agreement. What absurd in the highest possible degree. can be plainer than that the webbed feet Yet reason tells me that if numerous of ducks and geese are formed for swim­ gradations from a perfect and complex eye ming ? Yet there are upland geese with to one very imperfect and simple, each webbed feet which rarely or never go near grade being useful to its possessor, can be the water; and no one except Audubon shown to exist ; if, further, the eye does has seen the frigate-bird, which has all its vary ever so slightly and the variations be four toes webbed, alight on the surface of inherited, which is certainly the case, and the sea. On the other hand, grebes and if any variation or modification in the coots are eminently aquatic, although their organ be ever useful to an animal under toes are only bordered by membrane. changing conditions of life, then the What seems plainer than that the long difficulty of believing that a perfect and toes of grallatores are formed for walking complex eye could be formed by natural over swamps and floating plants ; yet the selection, though insuperable by our imagi­ water-hen is nearly as aquatic as the coot, nation, can hardly be considered real. and the landrail nearly as terrestrial as the How a nerve comes to be sensitive to quail or partridge. In such cases, and light hardly concerns us more than how many others could be given, habits have _ life itself first originated; but I may changed without a corresponding change ’ remark that several facts make me suspect of structure. The webbed feet of the that any sensitive nerve may be rendered upland goose may be said to have become sensitive to light, and likewise to those rudimentary in function, though not in coarser vibrations of the air which produce structure. In the frigate-bird the deeplysound. scooped membrane between the toes shows In looking for the gradations by which that structure has begun to change. an organ in any species has been perfected, He who believes in separate and in­ we ought to look exclusively to its lineal numerable acts of creation will say that in ancestors ; but this is scarcely ever pos­ these cases it has pleased the Creator to sible, and we are forced in each case to cause a being of one type to take the place look to species of the same group—that is, of one of another type ; but this seems to to the collateral descendants from the me only re-stating the fact in dignified same original parent-form—in order to see language. He who believes in the struggle what gradations are possible, and for the for existence and in the principle of natural chance of some gradations having been selection will acknowledge that every transmitted from the earlier stages of organic being is constantly endeavouring descent in an unaltered or little altered to increase in numbers ; and that if any condition. Among existing Vertebrata we one being vary ever so little either in find but a small amount of gradation in the habits or structure, and thus gain an structure of the eye, and from fossil species advantage over some other inhabitant of we can learn nothing on this head. In the country, it will seize on the place of this great class we should probably have that inhabitant, however different it may be to descend far beneath the lowest known from its own place. Hence it will cause fossiliferous stratum to discover the earlier him no surprise that there should be geese stages by which the eye has been perfected. and frigate-birds with webbed feet, living In the Articulata we can commence a on the dry land or most rarely alighting on series with an optic nerve merely coated the water ; that there should be long-toed with pigment, and without any other corncrakes living in meadows instead of in mechanism ; and from this low stage swamps; that there should be woodpeckers numerous gradations of structure, branch­ where not a tree grows ; that there should ing off in two fundamentally different lines, �So ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES can be shown to exist, until we reach a moderately high stage of perfection. In certain crustaceans, for instance, there is a double cornea, the inner one divided into facets, within each of which there is a lens­ shaped swelling. In other crustaceans the transparent cones which are coated by pigment, and which properly act only by excluding lateral pencils of light, are con­ vex at their upper ends, and must act by convergence; and at their lower ends there seems to be an imperfect vitreous sub­ stance. With these facts, here far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which i have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve, merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class. He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection, although in this case he does not know any of the transitional grades. His reason ought to conquer his imagina­ tion ; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of i natural selection to such startling lengths. It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the longcontinued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analo­ gous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous ? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intel­ lectual powers like those of man ? If we must compare the eye to an optical instru­ ment, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with i a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be con­ tinually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different dis­ tances from each other, and with the sur­ faces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied cir­ cumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million, and each to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. In living bodies variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds, and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man ? If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which coyld not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt, many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and, in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct. We should be extremely cautious in concluding that an organ -could not have been formed by transitional gradations of some kind. Numerous cases could be given among the lower animals of the same organ performing at the same time wholly distinct functions ; thus the alimen­ tary canal respires, digests, and excretes in the larva of the dragon-fly and in the fish Cobites. In the Hydra the animal may be turned inside out, and the exterior surfa.ee will then digest and the stomach respire. In such cases natural selection might easily specialise, if any advantage were thus gained, a part or organ, which �81 DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY branchiae might have bpen gradually had performed two functions, for one worked in by natural selection for some function alone, and thus wholly change its quite distinct purpose—in the same manner nature by insensible steps. Two distinct as, on the view entertained by some organs sometimes perform simultaneously naturalists that the branchiae and dorsal the same function in the same individual. scales of Annelids are homologous with To give one instance, there are fish with the wings and wing-covers of insects, it is gills or branchiae that breathe the air probable that organs which at. a very dissolved in the water at the same time ancient period served for respiration have that they breathe free air in their swim­ been actually converted into organs of bladders, this latter organ having a ductus flight. pneumaticus for its supply, and being In considering transitions of organs, it is divided by highly vascular partitions. _ In so important to bear in mind the proba­ these cases one of the two organs might bility of conversion from one function to with ease be modified and perfected so as another that I will give one more instance. to perform all the work by itself, being Pedunculated cirripedes have two minute aided, during the process of modification, folds of skin called by me the ovigerous by the other organ; and then this other frena, which serve, through the means of a organ might be modified for some other sticky secretion, to retain the eggs until and quite distinct purpose, or be quite they are hatched within the sack. These obliterated. cirripedes have no branchiae, the whole The illustration of the swimbladder in surface of the body and sack, including fishes is a good one, because it shows us the small frena, serving for respiration. clearly the highly important fact that an The Balanidae or sessile cirripedes, on the organ originally constructed for one other hand, have no ovigerous frena, the purpose, namely flotation, may be con­ eggs lying loose at the bottom of the sack verted into one for a wholly different in the well-enclosed shell ; but they have purpose, namely respiration. The swim­ large folded branchiae. Now, I think no bladder has also been worked in as an one will dispute that the ovigerous frena accessory to the auditory organs of certain in the one family are strictly homologous fish, or, for I do not know which view is with the branchiae of the other family ; now generally held, a part of the auditory indeed, they graduate into each other. apparatus has been worked in as a com­ Therefore, I do not doubt that little folds plement to the swimbladder. All physio­ of skin, which originally served as ovige­ logists admit that the swimbladder is rous frena, but which, likewise, very slightly homologous or “ ideally similar ” in posi­ aided the act of respiration, have been tion and structure with the lungs of the gradually converted by natural selection higher vertebrate animals; hence there into branchiae, simply through an increase seems to me to be no great difficulty in in their size and the obliteration of their believing that natural selection has actually adhesive glands. If all pedunculated cirri­ converted a swimbladder into a lung or pedes had become extinct, and they have organ used exclusively for respiration. already suffered far more extinction than I can, indeed, hardly doubt that all have sessile cirripedes, who would ever have vertebrate animals having true lungs have imagined that the branchiae in this latter descended by ordinary generation from an family had originally existed as organs for ancient prototype of which we know preventing the ova from being washed out nothing, furnished with a floating appa­ of the sack ? ratus or swimbladder. We can thus, as Although we must be extremely cautious I infer from Professor Owen’s interesting in concluding that any organ could not ; description of these parts, understand the possibly have been produced by successive strange fact that every particle of food and transitional gradations, yet, undoubtedly, drink which we swallow has to pass over grave cases of difficulty occur, some of . the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of which will be discussed in my future work. falling into the lungs, notwithstanding the One of the gravest is that of neuter beautiful contrivance by which the glottis insects, which are often very differently is closed. In the higher Vertebrata the constructed from either the males or fertile branchiae have wholly disappeared—the females; but this case will be treated of in slits on the sides of the neck and the loop­ the next chapter. The electric organs of like course of the arteries still marking in fishes offer another case of special difficulty; the embryo their former position. But it it is impossible to conceive by what steps is conceivable that the now utterly lost G �82 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES these wondrous organs have been pro­ duced ; but, as Owen and others have remarked, their intimate structure closely resembles that of common muscle; and as it has lately been shown that Rays have an organ closely analogous to the electric apparatus, and yet do not, as Matteucei asserts, discharge any electricity, we must own that we are far too ignorant to argue that no transition of any kind is possible. The electric organs offer another and even more serious difficulty, for they occur in only about a dozen fishes, of which several are widely remote in their affinities. Generally, when the same organ appears in several members of the same class, especially if in members having very dif­ ferent habits of life, we may attribute its presence to inheritance from a common ancestor, and its absence in some of the members to its loss through disuse or natural selection. But, if the electric organs had been inherited from one ancient progenitor thus provided, we might have expected that all electric fishes would have been specially related to each other. Nor does geology at all lead to the belief that formerly most fishes had electric organs, which most of their modified des­ cendants have lost. The presence of luminous organs in a few insects, belonging to different families and orders, offers a parallel case of difficulty. Other cases could be given: for instance, in plants i the very curious contrivance of a mass of pollen-grains, borne on a foot-stalk with a sticky gland at the end, is the same in Orchis and Asclepias—genera almost as remote as possible among flowering plants. In all these cases of two very distinct species furnished with apparently the same anomalous organ it should be observed that, although the general ap­ pearance and function of the organ may be the same, yet some fundamental dif­ ference can generally be detected. I am inclined to believe that, in nearly the same way as two men have sometimes indepen­ dently hit on the very same invention, so natural selection, working for the good of each being and taking advantage of analogous variations, has sometimes modi­ fied in very nearly the same manner two parts in two organic beings, which beings owe but little of their structure in common to inheritance from the same ancestor. Although, in many cases, it is most diffi­ cult to conjecture by what transitions organs could have arrived at their present states yet, considering that the proportion of living and known forms to the extinct and un­ known is very small, I have been astonished how rarely an organ can be named towards which no transitional grade is known to lead. The truth of this remark is indeed shown by that old, but somewhat exaggerated, canon in natural history of “ Natura non facit saltum.” We meet with this admission in the writings of almost every experienced naturalist; or, as Milne Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation. Why, on the theory of Creation, should this be so? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps ? Why should not nature have taken a leap from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations ; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps. Organs of little apparent importance.— As natural selection acts by life and death, by the preservation of individuals with any favourable variation, and by the destruction of those with any unfavourable deviation of structure, I have sometimes felt much difficulty in understanding the origin of simple parts of which the impor­ tance does not seem sufficient to cause the preservation of successively varying indi­ viduals. I have sometimes felt as much difficulty, though of a very different kind, on this head, as in the case of an organ as perfect and complex as the eye. In the first place, we are much too ignorant in regard to the whole economy of any one organic being to say what slight modifications would be of importance or not. In a former chapter I have given instances of most trifling characters, such as the down on fruit and the colour of its flesh, which, from determining the attacks of insects or from being correlated with constitutional differences, might assuredly be acted on by natural selection. The tail of the giraffe looks like an artificially con­ structed fly-flapper; and it seems at first incredible that this could have been adapted for its present purpose by succes­ sive slight modifications, each better and better, for so trifling an object as driving away flies ; yet we should pause before being too positive even in this case, for we �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY know that the distribution and existence of cattle and other animals in South America absolutely depends on their power of resisting the attacks of insects ; so that individuals which could by any means defend themselves from these small enemies would be able to range into new pastures, and thus gain a great advantage. It is not that the larger quadrupeds are actually destroyed (except in some rare cases) by flies, but they are incessantly harassed and their strength reduced, so that they are more subject to disease, or not so well enabled in a coming dearth to search for food, or to escape from beasts of prey. Organs now of trifling importance have probably in some cases been of high importance to an early progenitor, and, after having been slowly perfected at a former period, have been transmitted in nearly the same state, although now become of very slight use; and any actually injurious deviations in their struc­ ture will always have been checked by natural selection. Seeing how important an organ of locomotion the tail is in most aquatic animals, its general presence and use for many purposes in so many land animals, which in their lungs or modified swimbladders betray their aquatic origin, may perhaps be thus accounted for. A well-developed tail having been formed in an aquatic animal, it might subsequently come to be worked in for all sorts of pur­ poses, as a fly-flapper, an organ of pre­ hension, or as an aid in turning, as with the dog, though the aid must be slight, for the hare, with hardly any tail, can double quickly enough. In the second place, we may sometimes attribute importance to characters which are really of very little importance, and which have originated from quite secondary causes, independently of natural selection. We should remember that climate, food, etc., probably have some little direct influ­ ence on the organisation ; that characters reappear from the law of reversion ; that correlation of growth will have had a most important influence in modifying various structures ; and, finally, that sexual selec­ tion will often have largely modified the external characters of animals having a will, to give one male an advantage in fighting with another or in charming the females. Moreover, when a modification of structure has primarily arisen from the above or other unknown causes, it may at first have been of no advantage to the species, but may subsequently have been 83 taken advantage of by the descendants of the species under new conditions of life and with newly-acquired habits. To give a few instances to illustrate these latter remarks. If green wood­ peckers alone had existed, and we did not know that there were many black arid pied kinds, I dare say that we should have thought that the green colour was a beauti­ ful adaptation to hide this tree-frequenting bird from its enemie§; and, consequently, that it was a character of importance, and might have been acquired through natural selection. As it is, I have no doubt that the colour is due to some quite distinct cause, probably to sexual selection. A trailing bamboo in the Malay archipelago climbs the loftiest trees by the aid of exquisitely constructed hooks clustered around the ends of the branches, and this contrivance, no doubt, is of the highest service to the plant; but, as we see nearly similar hooks on many trees which are not climbers, the hooks on the bamboo may have arisen from unknown laws of growth, and have been subsequently taken advan­ tage of by the plant undergoing further modification and becoming a climber. The naked skin on the head of a vulture is generally looked at as a direct adapta­ tion for wallowing in putridity; and so it may be, or it may possibly be due to the direct action of putrid matter; but we should be very cautious in drawing any such inference, when we see that the skin on the head of t-he clean-feeding male turkey is likewise naked. The sutures in the skulls of young mammals have been advanced as a beautiful adaptation for aiding -parturition, and no doubt they facilitate, or may be indispensable for this act; but as sutures occur in the skulls of young birds and reptiles, which have only to escape from a broken egg, we may infer that this structure has arisen from the laws of growth, and has been taken advantage of in the parturition of the higher animals. We - are profoundly ignorant of the causes producing slight and unimportant variations, and we are immediately made conscious of this by reflecting on the differences in the breeds of our domesti­ cated animals in different countries, more especially in the less civilised countries where there has been but little artificial selection. Careful observers are convinced that a damp climate affects the growth of the hair, and that with the hair the horns are correlated. Mountain breeds always �84 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES differ from lowland breeds, and a moun­ tainous country would probably affect the hind limbs from exercising them more, and possibly even the form of the pelvis; and then by the law of homologous variation the front limbs, and even the head, would probably be affected. The shape also of the pelvis might affect by pressure the shape of the head of the young in the womb. The laborious breathing necessary in high regions would, we have some reason to believe, increase the size of the chest, and again correlation would come into play. Animals kept by savages in different countries often have to struggle for their own subsistence, and would be exposed to a certain extent to natural selection, and individuals with slightly different constitutions would succeed best under different climates ; and there is reason to believe that constitution and colour are correlated. A good observer also states that in cattle susceptibility to the attacks of flies is correlated with colour, as is the liability to be poisoned by certain plants; so that colour would be thus subjected to the action of natural selection. But we are far too ignorant to specu­ late on the relative importance of the several known and unknown laws of varia­ tion ; and I have here alluded to them only to show that, if we are unable to account for the characteristic differences of our domestic breeds, which nevertheless we generally admit to have arisen through ordinary generation, we ought not to lay too much stress on our ignorance of the precise cause of the slight analogous dif­ ferences between species. I might have adduced for this same purpose the differ­ ences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked. I may add that some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin of these differences, chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind; but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous. The foregoing remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its pos­ sessor. They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty­ in the eyes of man, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory. Yet I fully admit that many structures are of no direct use to their possessors. Physical conditions pro­ bably have had some little effect on struc­ ture, quite independently of any good thus gained. Correlation of growth has no doubt played a most important part, and a useful modification of one part will often have entailed on other parts diversified changes of no direct use. So, again, cha­ racters which formerly were useful, or which formerly had arisen from correlation of growth, or from other unknown cause, may reappear from the law of reversion, though now of no direct use. The effects of sexual selection, when displayed in beauty to charm the females, can be called useful only in rather a forced sense. But by far the most important consideration is that the chief part of the organisation of every being is simply due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures now have no direct relation to the habits of life of each species. Thus we can hardly believe that the webbed feet of the upland goose or of the frigate-bird are of special use to these birds; we cannot believe that the small bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore-leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance. But to the progenitor of the upland goose and of the frigate-bird webbed feet no doubt were as useful as they now are to the most aquatic of existing birds. So we may believe that the progenitor of the seal had not a flipper, but a foot with five toes fitted for walking or grasping; and we may fur­ ther venture to believe that the several bones in the limbs of the monkey, horse, and bat, which have been inherited from a common progenitor, were formerly of more special use to that progenitor, or its pro­ genitors, than they now are to these animals having such widely diversified habits. Therefore, we may infer that these several bones might have been acquired through natural selection, subjected for­ merly, as now, to the several laws of in­ heritance, reversion, correlation of growth, etc. Hence every detail of structure in every living creature (making some little allowance for the direct action of physical conditions) may be viewed, either as havingbeen of special use to some ancestral form, or as being now of special use to the descendants of this form—either directly, or indirectly through the complex laws of growth. Natural selection cannot possibly pro­ duce any modification in any one species �DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY exclusively for the good of another species ; though throughout nature one species in­ cessantly takes advantage of, and profits by, the structure of another. But natural selection can and does often produce struc­ tures for the direct injury of other species, as we see in the fang of the adder, and in the ovipositor of the ichneumon, by which its eggs are deposited in the living bodies of other insects. If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would anni­ hilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection. Although many statements may be found in works on natural history to this effect, I cannot find even one which seems to me of any weight. It is admitted that the rattle­ snake has a poison-fang for its own defence and for the destruction of its prey ; but some authors suppose that at the same time this snake is furnished with a rattle for its own injury—namely, to warn its prey to escape. I would almost as soon believe that the cat curls the end of its tail when preparing to spring in order to warn the doomed mouse. But I have not space here to enter on this and other such cases. Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous. After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modi­ fied ; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct. Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence. And we see that this is the degree of perfection attained under nature. The endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one compared with another; but they are now rapidly yielding before the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe. Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection; nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature. The correction for the aberration of light is 85 said, on high authority, not to be perfect even in that most perfect organ, the eye. If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable con­ trivances in nature, this same reason tells us, though we may easily err on both sides, that some other contrivances are less perfect. Can we consider the sting of the wasp or of the bee as perfect, which, when used against many attacking animals, cannot be withdrawn, owing to the back­ ward serratures, and so inevitably causes the death of the insect by tearing out its viscera ? If we look at the sting of the bee, as having originally existed in a remote pro­ genitor as a boring and serrated instru­ ment, like that in so many members of the same great order, and which has been modified, but not perfected for its present purpose, with the poison originally adapted to cause galls subsequently intensified, we can perhaps understand how it is that the use of the sting should so often cause the insect’s own death ; for if, on the whole, the power of stinging be useful to the community, it will fulfil all the require­ ments of natural selection, though it may cause the death of some few members. If we admire the truly wonderful power of scent by which the males of many insects find their females, can we admire the pro­ duction for this single purpose of thousands of drones, which are utterly useless to the community for any other end, and which are ultimately slaughtered by their indus­ trious and sterile sisters? It may be difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen­ bee, which urges her instantly to destroy the young queens, her daughters, as soon as born, or to perish herself in the combat; for undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; and maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection. If we admire the several ingenious contrivances by which the flowers of the orchids and of many other plants are fertilised through insect agency, can we consider as equally perfect the elaboration by our fir-trees of dense clouds of pollen, in order that a few granules may be wafted by a chance'breeze on to the ovules ? Summary of Chapter.—We have in this chapter discussed some of the difficulties and objections which may be urged against my theory. Many of them are very serious; �86 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES but I think that in the discussion light has been thrown on several facts which on the theory of independent acts of creation are utterly obscure. We have seen that species at any one period are not indefinitely variable, and are not linked together by a multitude of intermediate gradations, partly because the process of natural selec­ tion will always be very slow, and will act, at any one time, only on a very few forms ; and partly because the very process of natural selection almost implies the con­ tinual supplanting and extinction of pre­ ceding and intermediate gradations. Closely-allied species, now living on a continuous area, must often have been formed when the area was not continuous, and when the conditions of life did not insensibly graduate away from one part to another. When two varieties are formed in two districts of a continuous area, an intermediate variety will often be formed, fitted for an intermediate zone ; but, from reasons assigned, the intermediate variety will usually exist in lesser numbers than the two forms which it connects ; conse­ quently, the two latter, during the course of further modification, from existing in greater numbers, will have a great advan­ tage over the less numerous intermediate variety, and will thus generally succeed in supplanting and exterminating it. We have seen in this chapter how cautious we should be in concluding that the most different habits of life could not graduate into each other; that a bat, for instance, could not have been formed by natural selection from an animal which at first could only glide through the air. We have seen that a species may, under new conditions of life, change its habits, or have diversified habits, with some habits very unlike those of its nearest congeners. Hence we can understand, bearing in mind that each organic being is trying to live wherever it can. live, how it has arisen that there are upland geese with webbed feet, ground woodpeckers, diving thrushes, and petrels with the habits of auks. Although the belief, that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection, is more than enough to stagger anyone, yet in the case of any organ, if we know of a long series of gra­ dations in complexity, each good for its possessor, then, under changing conditions of life, there is no logical impossibility in the acquirement of any conceivable degree of perfection through natural selection. In the cases in which we know of no inter- ♦ mediate or transitional states we should be very cautious in concluding that none could have existed, for the*homologies of many organs and their intermediate states show that wonderful metamorphoses in function are at least possible. For in­ stance, a swim-bladder has apparently been converted into an air-breathing lung. The same organ having performed simul­ taneously very different functions, and then having been specialised for one function; and two very distinct organs having per­ formed at the same time the same func­ tion, the one having been perfected while aided by the other, must often have largely facilitated transitions. We are far too ignorant, in almost every case, to be enabled to assert that any part or organ is so unimportant for the welfare of a species that modifications in its structure could not have been slowly accu­ mulated by means of natural selection. But we may confidently believe that many modifications, wholly due to the laws of growth, and at first in no way advan­ tageous to a species, have been subse­ quently taken advantage of by the still further modified descendants of this species. We may, also, believe that a part formerly of high importance has often been retained (as the tail of an aquatic animal by its terrestrial descendants), though it has become of such small importance that it could not, in its present state, have been acquired by natural selection—a poweiwhich acts solely by the preservation of profitable variations in the struggle for life. Natural selection will produce nothing in one species for the exclusive good or injury of another; though it may well produce parts, organs, and excretions highly useful or even indispensable, or highly injurious to another species, but in all cases at the same time useful to the owner. Natural selection in each wellstocked country must act chiefly through the competition of the inhabitants one with another, and consequently will produce perfection, or strength in the battle for life, only according to the standard of that country. Hence the inhabitants of one country, generally the smaller one, will often yield, as we see they do yield, to the inhabitants of another and generally larger country. For in the larger country7 there will have existed more individuals and more diversified forms, and the com­ petition will have been severer, and thus the standard of perfection will have been rendered higher. Natural selection will �INSTINCT not necessarily produce absolute perfec­ tion ; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found. On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “ Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct; but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true. It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws—Unity of Type, and the Con­ ditions of Existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite in­ 87 dependent of their habits of life. On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent. The expression of conditions of existence, so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier, is fully embraced by the principle of natural selection. For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of eac-h being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life, or by having adapted them during long-past periods of time; the adaptations being aided in some cases by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct action of the external conditions of life, and being in all cases subjected to the several laws of growth. Hence, in fact, the law of the Conditions of Existence is the higher law. as it includes, through the inheritance of former adaptations, that of Unity of Type. Chapter VII. INSTINCT Instincts comparable with habits, but different I one understands what is meant when it is in their origin—Instincts graduated—Aphides said that instinct impels the cuckoo to and ants—-Instincts variable—Domestic in­ migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds’ stincts, their origin—Natural instincts of the nests. An action, which we ourselves cuckoo, ostrich, and parasitic bees—Slave­ should require experience to enable us to making ants—Hive-bee, its cell-making in­ perform, when performed by an animal, stinct—Difficulties on the theory of the Natural more especially by a very young one, Selection of instincts—Neuter or sterile in­ without any experience, and when per­ sects—S ummary. The subject of instinct might have been worked into the previous chapters; but I have thought that it would be more con­ venient to treat the subject separately, especiallyas so wonderful an instinct as that of the hive-bee making its cells will probably have occurred to many readers as a diffi­ cultysufficient to overthrow my whole theory. I must premise that I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself. We are concerned only with the diversities of instinct and of the other mental qualities of animals within the same class. I will not attempt any definition of instinct. It would be easy to show that several distinct mental actions are com­ monly embraced by this term; but every formed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what pur­ pose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive. But I could show that none of these characters of instinct are universal. A little dose, as Pierre Huber expresses it, of judgment or reason often comes into play even in animals very low in the scale of nature. Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed, not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will, yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with ' • �88 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES other habits, and with certain periods of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought: so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work. If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen— then the resemblance between what origi­ nally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively. But it would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then trans­ mitted by inheritance to succeeding genera­ tions. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted—namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired. It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structure for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is, at least, possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species ; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have originated. As modifications of corporeal structure arise from, and are increased by, use or habit, and are diminished or lost by disuse, so I do not doubt it has been with instincts. But I believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts —that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations of bodily structure. No complex instinct can possibly be produced through natural selection, except by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous, slight, yet profitable, variations. Hence, as in the case of corporeal struc­ tures, we ought to find in nature, not the actual transitional gradations by which each complex instinct has been acquired—for these could be found only in the lineal ancestors of each species—but we ought to find in the collateral lines of descent some evidence of such gradations ; or we ought at least t-o be- able to show that gradations of some kind are possible ; and this we certainly can do. I have been surprised to find, making allowance for the instincts of animals having been but little observed except in Europe and North America, and for no instinct being known among extinct species, how very generally gradations, leading to the most complex instincts, can be discovered. Changes of instinct may sometimes be facilitated by the same species having different instincts at different periods of life or at different seasons of the year, or when placed under different circumstances, etc.; in which case either one or the other instinct might be preserved by natural selection. And such instances of diversity of instinct in the same species can be shown to occur in nature. Again, as in the case of corporeal struc­ ture, and conformably with my theory, the instinct of each species is good for itself, but has never, as far as we can judge, been produced for the exclusive good of others. One of the strongest instances of an animal apparently performing an action for the sole good of another, with* which I am acquainted, is that of aphides voluntarily yielding their sweet excretion to ants: that they do so voluntarily the following facts show. I removed all the ants from a group of about a dozen aphides on a dock­ plant, and prevented their attendance �INSTINCT during several hours. After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I watched them for some time through a lens, but not one excreted ; I then tickled and stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as well as I could, as the ants do with their antennae ; but not one excreted. Afterwards I allowed an ant to visit them, and it immediately seemed, by its eager way of running about, to be well aware what a rich flock it had discovered; it then began to play with its antennae on the abdomen first of one aphis and then of another; and each aphis, as soon as it felt the antennae, immediately lifted up its abdomen and excreted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was eagerly devoured by the ant. Even the quite young aphides behaved in this manner, showing that the action was instinctive, and not the result of experience. But as the excretion is extremely viscid, it is probably a con­ venience to the aphides to have it removed; and therefore probably the aphides do not instinctively excrete for the sole good of the ants. Although I do not believe that any animal in the world performs an action for the exclusive good of another of a distinct species, yet each species tries to take advantage of the instinct of others, as each takes advantage of the weaker bodily structure of others. So again, in some few cases, certain instincts cannot be con­ sidered as absolutely perfect; but, as details on this and other such points are not indispensable, they may be here passed over. As some degree of variation in instincts under a state of nature, and the inheritance of such variations, are indispensable for the action of natural selection, as many in­ stances as possible ought to be here given; but want of space prevents me. I can only assert that instincts certainly do vary—for instance, the migratory instinct, both in extent and direction, and in its total loss. So it is with the nests of birds, which vary partly in dependence on the situations chosen, and on the nature and temperature of the country inhabited, but often from causes wholly unknown to us : Audubon has given several remarkable cases of differences in the nests of the same species in the northern and southern United States. Fear of any particular enemy is certainly an instinctive quality, as may be seen in nestling birds, though it is strength­ ened by experience, and by the sight of fear of the same enemy in other animals. But fear of man is slowly acquired, as I 89 have elsewhere shown, by various animals inhabiting desert islands; and we may see an instance of this, even in England, in the greater wildness of all our large birds than of our small birds, for the large birds have been most persecuted by man. We may safely attribute the greater wildness of our large birds to this cause, for in uninhabited islands large birds are not more fearful than small; and the magpie, so wary in England, is tame in Norway, as is the hooded crow in Egypt. . That the general disposition of indi­ viduals of the same species, born in a state of nature, is extremely diversified can be shown by a multitude of facts. Several cases, also, could be given of occasional and strange habits in certain species, which might, if advantageous to the species, give rise, through natural selec­ tion, to quite new instincts. But I am well aware that these general statements, without facts given in detail, can produce but a feeble effect on the reader’s mind. I can only repeat my assurance, that I do not speak without good evidence. The possibility, or even probability, of inherited variations of instinct in a state of nature will be strengthened by briefly con­ sidering a few cases under domestication. We shall thus also be enabled to see the respective parts which habit and the selection of so-called accidental variations have played in modifying the mental qualities of our domestic animals. A number of curious and authentic instances could be given of the inheritance of all shades of disposition and tastes, and like­ wise of the oddest tricks, associated with certain frames of mind or periods of time. But let us look to the familiar case of the several breeds of dogs : it cannot be doubted that young pointers (I have my­ self seen a striking instance) will some­ times point and even back other dogs the very first time that they are taken out; retrieving is certainly in some degree in­ herited by retrievers ; and a tendency to run round, instead of at, a flock of sheep by shepherd-dogs. I cannot see that these actions, performed without experience by the young, and in nearly the same manner by each individual, performed with eager delight by each breed, and without the end being known—for the young pointer can no more know that he points to aid his master than the white butterfly knows why she lays her eggs on the leaf of the cabbage —I cannot see that these actions differ essentially from true instincts. If we were �go ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES to see one kind of wolf, when young and without any training, as soon as it scented its prey, stand motionless like a statue, and then slowly crawl forward with a peculiar gait; and another kind of wolf rushing round, instead of at, a herd of deer, and driving them to a distant point, we should assuredly call these actions instinctive. Domestic instincts, as they may be called, are certainly far less fixed or invariable than natural instincts ; but they have been acted on by far less rigorous selection, and have been transmitted for an incomparably shorter period under less fixed conditions of life. How strongly these domestic instincts, habits, and dispositions are inherited, and . how curiously they become mingled, is well shown when different breeds of dogs are crossed. Thus it is known that a cross with a bull-dog has affected for many generations the courage and obstinacy of greyhounds; and a cross with a greyhound has given to a whole family of shepherd­ dogs a tendency to hunt hares. These domestic instincts, when thus tested by crossing, resemble natural instincts, which in a like manner become curiously blended together, and for a long period exhibit traces of the instincts of either parent: for example, Le Roy describes a dog, whose great-grandfather was a wolf, and this dog showed a trace of its wild parentage only in one way, by not coming in a straight line to his master when called. Domestic instincts are sometimes spoken of as actions which have become inherited solely from long-continued and compulsory habit; but this, I think, is not true. No one would ever have thought of teaching, or probably could have taught, the tumbler­ pigeon to tumble—an action which, as I have witnessed, is performed by young birds that have never seen a pigeon tumble. We may believe that some one pigeon showed a slight tendency to this strange habit, and that the long-continued selection of the best individuals in succes­ sive generations made tumblers what they now are; and near Glasgow there are house-tumblers, as I hear from Mr. Brent, which cannot fly eighteen inches high without going head over heels. It may be doubted whether anyone would have thought of training a dog to point had not some one dog naturally shown a tendency in this line ; and this is known occasionally to happen, as I once saw in a pure terrier : the act of pointing is probably, as many have thought, only the exaggerated pause of an animal preparing to spring on its prey. When the first tendency to point was once displayed, methodical selection and the inherited effects of compulsory training in each successive generation would soon complete the work; and unconscious selection is still at work, as each man tries to procure, without intending to improve the breed, dogs which will stand and hunt best. On the other hand, habit alone in some cases has sufficed; no animal is more difficult to tame than the young of the wild rabbit ; scarcely any animal is tamer than the young of the tame rabbit; but I do not suppose that domestic rabbits have ever been selected for tameness ; and I presume that we must attribute the whole of the inherited change from extreme wildness to extreme tame­ ness simply to habit and long-continued close confinement. Natural instincts are lost under domesti­ cation : a remarkable instance of this is seen in those breeds of fowls which very rarely or never become “ broody ’’—that is, never wish to sit on their eggs. Familiarity alone prevents our seeing how universally and largely the minds of our domestic animals have been modified by domestica­ tion. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog. All wolves, foxes, jackals, and species of the cat genus, when kept tame, are most eager to attack poultry, sheep, and pigs; and this tendency has been found incurable in dogs which have been brought home as puppies from countries such as Tierra del Fuego and Australia, where the savages do not keep these domestic animals. How rarely, on the other hand, do our civilised dogs, even when quite young, require to be taught not to attack poultry, sheep, and pigs 1 No doubt they occasionally do make an attack, and are then beaten ; and if not cured, they are destroyed ; so that habit, with some degree of selection, has probably concurred in civilising by inheritance our dogs. On the other hand, young chickens have lost, wholly by habit, that fear of the dog and cat, which no doubt was origi­ nally instinctive in them, in the same way as it is- so plainly instinctive in young pheasants, though reared under a hen. It is not that chickens have lost all fear, but fear only of dogs and cats, for, if the hen gives the danger-chuckle, they will run (more especially young turkeys) from under her, and conceal themselves in the sur­ rounding grass or thickets ; and this is �INSTINCT evidently done for the instinctive purpose of allowing, as we see in wild ground­ birds, their mother to fly away. But this instinct retained by our chickens has become useless under domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the power of flight. Hence, we may conclude that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accu­ mulating, during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident. In some cases compulsory habit alone has sufficed to produce such inherited mental changes ; in other cases compulsory habit has done nothing, and all has been the result of selection, pursued both methodically and unconsciously; but in most cases, pro­ bably, habit and selection have acted together. We shall, perhaps, best understand how instincts in a state of nature have become modified by selection by considering a few cases. I will select only three out of the several which I shall have to discuss in my future work—namely, the instinct which leads the cuckoo to lay her eggs in other birds’ nests; the slave-making instinct of certain ants ; and the comb-makrng power of the hive-bee : these two latter instincts have generally, and most justly, been ranked by naturalists as the most wonderful of all known instincts. It is now commonly admitted that the more immediate and final cause of the cuckoo’s instinct is that she lays her eggs, not daily, but at intervals of two or three days ; so that, if she were to make her own nest and sit on her own eggs, those first laid would have to be left for some time unincubated, or there would be eggs and young birds of different ages in the same nest. If this were the case, the process of laying and hatching might be incon­ veniently long, more especially as she has to migrate at a very early period; and the first hatched young would probably have to be fed by the male alone. But the American cuckoo is in this predicament ; for she makes her own nest and has eggs and young successively hatched, all at the same time. It has been asserted that the American cuckoo occasionally lays her eggs in other birds’ nests ; but I hear on the high authority of Dr. Brewer that this is a mistake. Nevertheless, I could give several instances of various birds which have been 9i known occasionally to lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. Now let us suppose that the ancient progenitor of our European cuckoo had the habits of the American cuckoo, but that occasionally she laid an egg in another bird’s nest. If the old bird profited by this occasional habit, or if the young were made more vigorous by advan­ tage having been taken of the mistaken maternal instinct of another bird than by their own mother’s care, encumbered as she can hardly fail to be by having eggs and young of different ages at the same time, then the old birds or the fostered . young would gain an advantage. And analogy would lead me to believe that the young thus reared would be apt to follow by inheritance the occasional and aberrant habit of their mother, and in their turn would be apt to lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, and thus be successful in rear­ ing their young. By a continued process of this nature I believe that the strange instinct of our cuckoo could be, and has been, generated. I may add that, accord­ ing to Dr. Gray and to some other observers, the European cuckoo has not utterly lost all maternal love and care for her own off­ spring. The occasional habit of birds laying their eggs in other birds’ nests, either of the same or of a distinct species, is not very uncommon with the Gallinacese ; and this perhaps explains the origin of a singular instinct in the allied group of ostriches. For several hen ostriches, at least in the case of the American species, unite and lay first a few eggs in one nest and then in another ; and these are hatched by the males. This instinct may probably be accounted for by the fact of the hens laying a large number of eggs, but, as in the case of the cuckoo, at intervals of two or three days. This instinct, however, of the American ostrich has not as yet been per­ fected ; for a surprising number of eggs lie strewed over the plains, so that in one day’s hunting I picked up no less than twenty lost and wasted eggs. Many bees are parasitic, and always lay their eggs in the nests of bees of other kinds. This case is more remarkable than that of the cuckoo ; for these bees have not only their instincts but their structure modified in accordance with their parasitic habits ; for they do not possess the pollen­ collecting apparatus which would be neces­ sary if they, had to store food for their own young. Some, species, likewise, of Sphegidse (wasp-like insects) are parasitic �92 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES on other species ; and M. Fabre has latelyshown good reason for believing that although the Tachytes nigra generally makes its own burrow and stores it with paralysed prey for its own larvae to feed on, yet that when this insect finds a burrow already made and stored by another sphex, it takes advantage of the prize, and becomes for the occasion parasitic. In this case, as with the supposed case of the cuckoo, I can see no difficulty in natural selection making an occasional habit permanent, if of advantage to the species, and if the insect whose nest and stored food are thus feloniously appropriated be not thus exterminated. and Mr. Smith, I tried to approach the subject in a sceptical frame of mind, as anyone may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves. Hence I will give the observations which I have myself made, in some little detail. I opened fourteen nests of F. sanguinea, and found a few slaves in all. Males and fertile females of the slave-species (F. fusca) are found only in their own proper com­ munities, and have never been observed in the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are black and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally Slave-making instinct.—This remark­ come out, and like their masters are much able instinct was first discovered in the agitated and defend the nest; when the Formica (Polyerges) rufescens by Pierre nest is much disturbed and the larvse and' Huber, a better observer even than his pupae are exposed, the slaves work ener­ celebrated father. This ant is absolutely getically with their masters in carrying dependent on its slaves ; without their aid them away to a place of safety. Hence it the species would certainly become extinct is clear that the slaves feel quite at home. in a single year. The males and fertile During the months of June and July, on females do no work. The workers or three successive years, I have watched for sterile females, though most energetic and many hours several nests in Surrey and courageous in capturing slaves, do no Sussex, and never saw a slave either leave other work. They are incapable of making or enter a nest. As, during these months, their own nests, or of feeding their own the slaves are very few in number, I thought larvae. When the old nest is found incon­ that they might behave differently when venient, and they have to migrate, it is the more numerous ; but Mr. Smith informs slaves which determine the migration, and me that he has watched the nests at various they actually carry their masters in their hours during May, June, and August, both jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters, in Surrey and Hampshire, and has never that when Huber shut up thirty of them seen the slaves, though present in large without a slave, but with plenty of the food numbers in August, either leave or enter which they like best and with their larvse the nest. Hence he considers them as and pupae to stimulate them to work, they strictly household slaves. The masters, on did nothing; they could not even feed the other hand, may be constantly seen themselves, and many perished of hunger. bringing in materials for the nest, and food ' Huber then introduced a single slave (F. of all kinds. During the present year, fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed however, in the month of July, I came and saved the survivors; made some cells across a community with an unusually and tended the larvae, and put all to rights. large stock of slaves, and I observed a few What can be more extraordinary than these slaves mingled with their masters leaving well-ascertained facts? If we had not known the nest, and marching along the same of any other slave-making ant, it would road to a tall Scotch fir-tree, twenty-five have been hopeless to have speculated yards distant, which they ascended to­ how so wonderful an instinct could have gether, probably in search of aphides or been perfected. cocci. According to Huber, who had Another species, Formica san guinea, ample opportunities for observation, in was likewise first discovered by P.‘Huber Switzerland the slaves habitually work to be a slave-making- ant. This species with their masters in making the nest, is found in the southern parts of England, and they alone open and close the doors and its habits have been attended to by in the morning and evening; and, as Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, to Huber expressly states, their principal whom I am much indebted for informa­ office is to search for aphides. This dif­ tion on this and other subjects. Although ference in the usual habits of the masters fully trusting to the statements of Huber and slaves in the two countries probably �INSTINCT depends merely on the slaves being cap­ tured in greater numbers in Switzerland than in England. One day I fortunately witnessed a migra­ tion of F. sanguinea from one nest to another, and it was a most interesting spectacle to behold the masters carefully carrying (instead of being carried by, as in the case of F. rufescens) their slaves in their jaws. Another day my attention was struck by about a 'score of the slave-makers haunt­ ing the same spot, and evidently not in search of food; they approached and were vigorously repulsed by an independent community of the slave-species (F. fusca); sometimes as many as three of these ants clinging to the legs of the slave-making F. sanguinea. The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents, and carried their dead bodies as food to their nest, twenty-nine yards distant; but they were prevented from getting any pupae to rear as slaves. I then dug up a small parcel of the pupae of F. fusca from another nest, and put them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly seized, and carried off by the tyrants, who perhaps fancied that, after all, they had been vic­ torious in their late combat. At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pupae of another species, F. flava, with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the fragments of the nest. This species is sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants. In one instance I found to my surprise an independent community of F. flava under a stone beneath a nest of the slave-making F. sanguinea; and when I had accidentally disturbed both nests, the little ants attacked their big neighbours with surprising courage. Now I was curious to ascertain whether F. sanguinea could distinguish the pupae of F. fusca, which they habitually make into slaves, from those of the little and furious F. flava, which they rarely capture, and it was evident that they did at once distinguish them ; for we have seen that they eagerly and instantly seized the pupae of F. fusca, whereas they were much terrified when they came across the pupae, or even the earth from the nest of F. flava, and quickly ran away ; but in about a quarter of an hour, shortly after all the little yellow ants had crawled away, they took heart and carried off the pupae. One evening I visited another community 93 of F. sanguinea, and found a number of these ants returning home and entering their nests, carrying the dead bodies of F. fusca (showing that it was not a migration) and numerous pupae. I traced a long file of ants burthened with booty, for about forty yards, to a very thick clump of heath, whence I saw the last individual of F. san­ guinea emerge, carrying a pupa; but I was not able to find the desolated nest in the thick heath. The nest, however, must have been close at hand, for two or three indi­ viduals of F. fusca were rushing about in the greatest agitation, and one was perched motionless with its own pupa in its mouth on the top of a spray of heath, an image of despair over its ravaged home. Such are the facts, though they did not need confirmation by me, in regard to the wonderful instinct of making slaves. Let it be observed what a contrast the instinc­ tive habits of F. sanguinea present with those of the continental F. rufescens. The latter does not build its own nest, does not determine its own migrations, does not collect food for itself or its young, and cannot even feed itself: it is absolutely dependent on its numerous slaves. Formica sanguinea, on the other hand, possesses much fewer slaves, and in the early part of the summer extremely few: the masters determine when and where a new nest shall be formed, and when they migrate the masters carry the slaves. Both in Switzer­ land and England the slaves seem to have the exclusive care of the larvae, and the masters alone go on slave-making expe­ ditions. In Switzerland the slaves and masters work together, making and bringing materials for the nest: both, but chiefly the slaves, tend, and milk as it maybe called, their aphides ; and thus both collect food for the community. In England the masters alone usually leave the nest to collect building materials and food for themselves, their slaves, and larvae. So that the masters in this country receive much less service from their slaves than they do in Switzerland. By what steps the instinct of F. sanguinea originated I will not pretend to conjecture. But as ants, which are not slave-makers, will, as I have seen, carry off pupae of other species, if scattered near their nests, it is possible that such pupae originally stored as food might become developed ; and the foreign ants thus unintentionally reared would then follow their proper instincts, and do what work they could. If their presence proved useful to the species which had seized them—if it were �94 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES more advantageous to this species to ca-p. ture workers than to procreate them—the habit of collecting pupse originally for food might by natural selection be strengthened and rendered permanent for the very different purpose of raising slaves. When the instinct was once acquired, if carried out to a much less extent even than in our British F. sanguinea, which, as we have seen, is less aided by its slaves than the same species in Switzerland, I can see no difficulty in natural selection increasing and modifying the instinct—always sup­ posing each modification to be of use to the species—until an ant was formed as abjectly dependent on its slaves as is the Formica rufescens. Cell-making instinct of the Hive-Bee. —I will not here enter on minute details on this subject, but will merely give an outline of the conclusions at which I have arrived. He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beau­ tifully adapted to its end, without enthu­ siastic admiration. We hear from mathe­ maticians that bees have practically solved a recondite p?oblem, and have made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction. It has been remarked that a skilful workman, with fitting tools and measures, would find it very difficult to make cells of wax of the true form, though this is perfectly effected by a crowd of bees working in a dark hive. Grant whatever instincts you please, and it seems at first quite inconceivable how they can make all the necessary angles and planes, or even perceive when they are correctly made. But the difficulty is not nearly so great as it at first appears : all this beautiful work can be shown, I think, to follow from a few very simple instincts. I was led to investigate this subject by Mr. Waterhouse, who has shown that the form of the cell stands in close relation to the presence of adjoining cells ; and the following view may, perhaps, be considered only as a modification of his theory. Let us look to the great principle of gradation, and see whether Nature does not reveal to us her method of work. At one end of a short series we have humble-bees, which use their old cocoons to hold honey, some­ times adding to them short tubes of wax, and likewise making separate and very irregular rounded cells of wax. At the other end of the series we have the cells of the hive-bee, placed in a double layer: each cell, as is well known, is an hexagonal prism, with the basal edges of its six sides bevelled so as to fit on to a pyramid, formed of three rhombs. These rhombs have certain angles, and the three which form the pyramidal base of a single cell on one side of the comb enter into the composi­ tion of the bases of three adjoining cells on the opposite side. In the series between the extreme perfection of the cells of the hive-bee and the simplicity of those of the humble-bee we have the cells of the Mexican Melipona domestica carefully described and figured by Pierre Huber. The Melipona itself is intermediate in structure between the hive and humble bee, but more nearly related to the latter : it forms a nearly regular waxen comb of cylindrical cells, in which the young are hatched, and, in addition, some large cells of wax for holding honey. These latter cells are nearly spherical and of nearly equal sizes, and are aggregated into an irregular mass. But the important point to notice is that these cells are always made at that degree of nearness to each other that they would have intersected or broken into each other if the spheres had been completed; but this is never per­ mitted, the bees building perfectly flat walls of wax between the spheres which thus tend to intersect. Hence each cell consists of an outer spherical portion and of two, three, or more perfectly flat surfaces, according as the cell adjoins two, three, or more other cells. When one cell comes into contact with three other cells, which, from the spheres being nearly of the same size, is very frequently and necessarily the case, the three flat surfaces are united into a pyramid; and this pyramid, as Huber has remarked, is manifestly a gross imita­ tion of the three-sided pyramidal bases of the cell of the hive-bee. As in the cells of the hive-bee, so here, the three plane sur­ faces in any one cell necessarily enter into 'the construction of three adjoining cells. It is obvious that the Melipona saves wax by this manner of building ; for the flat walls between the adjoining cells are not double, but are of the' same thickness as the outer spherical portions, and yet each flat portion forms a part of two cells. Reflecting on this case, it occurred to me that if the Melipona had made its spheres at some given distance from each other, and had made them of equal sizes, and had arranged them symmetrically in a double �INSTINCT layer, the resulting structure would pro­ bably have been as perfect as the comb of the hive-bee. Accordingly I wrote to Pro­ fessor Miller, of Cambridge, and this geometer has kindly read over the follow­ ing statement, drawn up from his informa­ tion, and tells me that it is strictly correct:—• If a number of equal spheres be described with their centres placed in two parallel layers ; with the centre of each sphere at the distance of radius x •$/ 2, or radius x 1.41421 (or at some lesser distance), from the centres of the six surrounding spheres in the same layer; and at the same distance from the centres of the adjoining spheres in the other and parallel layer; then, if planes of intersection between the several spheres in both layers be formed, there will result a double layer of hexagonal prisms united together by pyramidal bases formed of three rhombs ; and the rhombs and the sides of the hexagonal prisms will have every angle identically the same with the best measurements which have been made of the cells of the hive-bee. Hence we may safely conclude that if we could slightly modify the instincts already possessed by the Melipona, and in themselves not very wonderful, this bee would make a structure as wonderfully perfect as that of the hive-bee. We must suppose the Melipona to make her cells truly spherical, and of equal sizes ; and this would not be very surprising, seeing that she already does so to a certain extent, and seeing what perfectly cylindrical burrows in wood many insects can make, apparently by turning round on a fixed point. We must suppose the Melipona to arrange her cells in level layers, as she already does her cylindrical cells ; and we must further suppose—and this is the greatest difficulty—that she can somehow judge accurately at what distance to stand from her fellow-labourers when several are making their spheres ; but she is already so far enabled to judge of distance that she always describes her spheres so as to inter­ sect largely; and then she unites the points of intersection by perfectly flat surfaces. We have further to suppose—but this is no difficulty—that after hexagonal prisms have been formed by the intersection of adjoin­ ing spheres in the same layer, she can prolong the hexagon to any length requisite to hold the stock of honey; in the same way as the rude humble-bee adds cylinders of wax to the circular mouths of her old cocoons. By such modifications of instincts in themselves not very wonderful—hardly 95 more wonderful than those which guide a bird to make its nest—I believe that the hive-bee has acquired, through natural selection, her inimitable • architectural powers. But this theory can be tested by experi­ ment. Following the example of Mr. Tegetmeier, I separated two combs, and put between them a long, thick, square strip of wax : the bees instantly began to excavate minute circular pits in it ; and as they deepened these little pits, they made them wider and wider, until they were con­ verted into shallow basins, appearing to the eye perfectly true or parts of a sphere, and of about the diameter of a cell. It was most interesting to me to observe that, wherever several bees had begun to ex­ cavate these basins near together, they had begun their work at such a distance from each other that by the time the basins had acquired the above stated width (z>., about the width of an ordinary cell), and were in depth about one sixth of the diameter of the sphere of which they formed a part, the rims of the basins intersected or broke into each other. As soon as this occurred, the bees ceased to excavate,*and began to build up flat walls of wax on the lines of intersection between the basins, so that each hexagonal prism was built upon the scalloped edge of a smooth basin, instead of on the straight edges of a three-sided pyramid, as in the case of ordinary cells. I then put into the hive, instead of a thick, square piece of wax, a thin and narrow, knife-edged ridge, coloured with vermilion. The bees instantly began on both sides to excavate little basins near to each other, in the same way as before ; but the ridge of wax was so thin that the bottoms of the basins, if they had been excavated to the same depth as in the former experiment, would have broken into each other from the opposite sides. The bees, however, did not suffer this to happen, and they stopped their excavations in due time ; so that the basins, as soon as they had been a little deepened, came to have flat bottoms; and ' these flat bottoms, formed by thin little plates of the ver­ milion wax having been left ungnawed, were situated, as far as the eye could judge, exactly along the planes of imagi­ nary intersection between the basins on the opposite sides of the ridge of wax. In parts only little bits, in other parts large portions of a rhombic plate, had been left between the opposed basins; but the work, from the unnatural state of �96 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES things, had not been neatly performed. The bees must have worked at very nearly the same rate on the opposite sides of the ridge of vermilion wax, as they circularly gnawed away and deepened the basins on both sides, in order to have succeeded in thus leaving flat plates between the basins, by stopping work along the intermediate planes or planes of intersection. Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see that there is any difficulty in the bees, while at work on the two sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they have gnawed the wax away to the proper thinness, and then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it has appeared to me that the bees do not always succeed in working at exactly the same rate from the opposite sides; for I have noticed half­ completed rhombs at the base of a justcommenced cell, which were slightly con­ cave on one side, where I suppose that the bees had excavated too quickly, and con­ vex on the opposed side, where the bees had worked less quickly. In one wellmarked instance I put the comb back into the hive, and. allowed the bees to go on working for a short time, and again ex­ amined the cell •, and I found that the rhombic plate had been completed, and had become perfectly flat: it was absolutely impossible, fr.om the extreme thinness of the little rhombic plate, that they could have effected this by gnawing away the convex side ; and I suspect that the bees in such cases stand in the opposed cells, and push and bend the ductile and warm wax (which, as I have tried, is easily done) into its proper intermediate plane, and thus flatten it. From the experiment of the ridge of ver­ milion wax, we can clearly see that, if the bees were to build for themselves a thin wall of wax, they could make their cells of the proper shape, by standing at the proper distance from each other, by excavating at the same rate, and by endeavouring to make equal spherical hollows, but never allowing the spheres to break into each other. Now, bees, as may be clearly seen by examining the edge of a growing comb, do make a rough, circumferential wall or rim all round the comb ; and they gnaw into this from the opposite sides, always working circularly as they deepen each cell. They do not make the whole threesided pyramidal base of any one cell at the same time, but only the one rhombic plate which stands on the extreme growing margin, or the two plates, as the case may be ; and they never complete the upper edges of the rhombic plates until the hexagonal walls are commenced. Some of these statements differ from those made by the justly celebrated elder Huber, but I am convinced of their accuracy; and, if I had space, I could show that they are con­ formable with my theory. Huber’s statement, that the very first cell is excavated out of a little parallel-sided wall of wax, is not, as far as I have seen, strictly correct, the first commencement having always been a little hood of wax; but I will not here enter on these details. We see how important a part excavation plays in the construction of the cells ; but it would be a great error to suppose that the bees cannot build up a rough wall of wax in the proper position—that is, along the plane of intersection between two adjoining spheres. I have several speci­ mens showing clearly that they can do this. Even in the rude circumferential rim or wall of wax round a growing comb flexures may sometimes be observed, corresponding in position to the planes of the rhombic basal plates of future cells. But the rough wall of wax has in every case to be finished off by being largely gnawed away on both sides. The manner in which the bees build is curious : they always make the first rough wall from ten to twenty times thicker than the excessively thin finished wall of the cell, which will ultimately be left. We shall understand how they work by supposing masons first to pile up a broad ridge of cement, and then to begin cutting it away equally on both sides near the ground till a smooth, very thin wall is left in the middle ; the masons always piling up the cut-away cement, and adding fresh cement, on the summit of the ridge. We shall thus have a thin wall steadily growing upward, but always crowned by a gigantic coping. From all the cells, both those just com­ menced and those completed, being thus crowned by a strong coping of wax, the bees can cluster and crawl over the comb without injuring the delicate hexagonal walls, vzhich are only about one fourhundredth of an inch in thickness, the plates of the pyramidal basis being about twice as thick. By this singular manner of building strength is continually given to the comb with the utmost ultimate economy of wax. It seems at first to add to the difficulty of understanding how the cells are made that a multitude of bees all work together; �INSTINCT one bee after working a short time at one cell going to another, so that, as Huber has stated, a score of individuals work even at the commencement of the first cell. I was able practically to show this fact by covering the edges of the hexagonal walls of a single cell, or the extreme margin of the circumferential rim of a growing comb, with an extremely thin layer of melted vermilion wax ; and I invariably found that the colour was most delicately diffused by the bees—as delicately as a painter could have done with his brush— by atoms of the coloured wax having been taken from the spot on which it had been placed, and worked into the growing edges of the cells all round. The work of con­ struction seems to be a sort of balance ■ struck between many bees, all instinctively standing at the same relative distance from each other, all trying to sweep equal spheres, and then building up, or leaving ungnawed, the planes of intersection between these spheres. It was really curious to note in cases of difficulty, as when two pieces of comb met at an angle, how often the bees would pull down and rebuild in different ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape which they had at first rejected. When bees have a place on which they can stand in their proper positions for working—for instance, on a slip of wood, placed directly under the middle of a comb growing downwards, so that the comb has to be built over one face of the slip—in this case the bees can lay the foundations of one wall of a new hexagon, in its strictly proper place, projecting beyond the other completed cells. It suffices that the bees should be enabled to stand at their proper relative distances from each other and from the walls of the last completed cells, and then, by striking imaginary spheres, they can build up a wall intermediate between two adjoining spheres ; but, as far as I have seen, they never gnaw away and finish off the angles of a cell till a large part both of that cell and of the adjoining cells has been built. This capacity in bees of laying down under certain circumstances a rough wall in its proper place between two just-commenced cells is important, as it bears on a fact, which seems at first quite subversiveof the foregoing theory—namely, that the cells on the extreme margin of wasp-combs are sometimes strictly hex­ agonal ; but I have not space here to enter on this subject. Nor does there seem to me any great difficulty in a single insect 97 (as in the case of a queen wasp) making hexagonal cells, if she work alternately on the inside and outside of two or three cells commenced at the same time, always standing at the proper relative distance from the parts of the cells just begun, sweep­ ing spheres or cylinders, and building up intermediate planes. It is even conceiv­ able that an insect might, by fixing on a point at which to commence a cell, and then moving outside, first to one point, and then to five other points, at the proper relative distances from the central point and from each other, strike the planes of intersection, and so make an isolated hexagon ; but I am not aware that any such case has been observed; nor would any good be derived from a single hexagon being built, as in its construction more materials would be required than for a cylinder. As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifications of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked how a long and graduated succession of modified architec­ tural instincts, all tending towards the present perfect plan of construction, could have profited the progenitors of the hive­ bee ? I think the answer is not difficult: it is known that bees are often hard pressed to get sufficient nectar; and I am informed by Mr. Tegetmeier that it has been experi­ mentally found that no less than from twelve to fifteen pounds of dry sugar are consumed by a hive of bees for the secre­ tion of each pound of wax ; to that a pro­ digious quantity of fluid nectar must be collected and consumed by the bees in a hive foi the secretion of the wax necessary for the construction of their combs. More­ over, many bees have to remain idle for many days during the process of secretion. A large store of honey is indispensable to support a large stock of bees during the winter; and the security of the hive is known mainly to depend on a large number of bees being supported. Hence the saving of wax by largely saving honey must be a most important element of success in any family of bees. Of course, the success of any species of bee may be dependent on the number of its parasites or other enemies, or on quite distinct causes, and so be altogether independent of the quantity of honey which the bees could collect. But let us suppose that this latter circum­ stance determined, as it probably often does determine, the numbers of a humblebee which could exist in a country; and �98 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES we cannot see how an instinct could pos­ let us further suppose that the community sibly have originated ; cases in which no lived throughout the winter, and conse­ quently required a store of honey : there intermediate gradations are known to exist; cases of instinct of apparently such trifling can, in this case, be no doubt that it would importance that they could hardly have be ah advantage to our humble-bee if a slight modification of her instinct led her to been acted on by natural selection ; cases make her waxen cells near together, so as of instincts almost identically the same in animals, so remote in the scale of nature to intersect a little ; for a wall in common, that we cannot account for their similarity even to two adjoining cells, would save by inheritance from a common parent, and some little wax. Hence it would continu­ must therefore believe that they have been ally be more and more advantageous to our acquired by independent acts of natural humble-bee if she were to make her cells selection. I will not here enter on these more and more regular, nearer together, several cases, but will confine myself to and aggregated into a mass, like the cells one special difficulty, which at first ap­ of the Melipona; for in this case a large peared to me insuperable, and actually part of the bounding surface of each cell fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the would serve to bound other cells, and much neuters or sterile females in insect-com­ wax would be saved. Again, from the same munities ; for these neuters often differ cause, it would be advantageous to the widely in instinct and in structure from Melipona if she were to make her cells both the males and fertile females, and closer together, and more regular in every yet, from being sterile, they cannot propa­ way than at present; for then, as we have gate their kind. seen, the spherical surfaces would wholly The subject well deserves to be discussed disappear, and would all be replaced by at great length, but I will here take only a plane surfaces ; and the Melipona would single case, that of working or sterile ants. make a comb as perfect as that of the How the workers have been rendered hive-bee. Beyond this stage of perfection sterile is a difficulty; but not much greater in architecture natural selection could not than that of any other striking modification lead; for the comb of the hive-bee, as far of structure ; for it can be shown that as we can see, is absolutely perfect in some insects' and other articulate animals economising wax. in a state of nature occasionally become Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of the hive-bee, .sterile; and if such insects had been social, and it had been profitable to the com­ can be explained by natural selection munity that a number should have been having taken advantage of numerous, annually born capable of work, but in­ successive, slight modifications of simpler capable of procreation, I can see no very instincts : natural selection having by slow great difficulty in this being effected by degrees, more and more perfectly, led the natural selection. But I must pass over bees to sweep equal spheres at a given this preliminary difficulty. The great diffi­ distance from each other in a double layer, culty lies in the working ants differing and to build up and excavate the wax widely from both the males and the fertile along the planes of intersection. The females in structure, as in the shape of the bees, of course, no more knowing that thorax and in being destitute of wings and they swept their spheres at one particular sometimes of eyes, and in instinct As far distance from each other than they know as instinct alone is concerned, the pro­ what are the several angles of the hexa­ digious difference in this respect between gonal prisms and of the basal rhombic the workers and the perfect females would plates. The motive power of the process have been far better exemplified by of natural selection having been economy the hive-bee. If a working ant or other of wax; that individual swarm which neuter insect had been an animal in the wasted least honey in the secretion of wax ordinary state, I should have unhesitatingly having succeeded best, and having trans­ assumed that all its characters had been mitted by inheritance its newly-acquired slowly acquired through natural selection— economical instinct to new swarms, which namely, by an individual having been born in their turn will have had the best chance with some slight profitable modification of of succeeding in the struggle for existence. structure, this being inherited by its off­ spring, which again varied and were again No doubt many instincts of very diffi­ selected, and so onwards. _ But with the cult explanation could be opposed to the working ant we have an insect differing theory of natural selection—cases in which �INSTINCT greatly from its parents, yet absolutely sterile ; so that it could never have trans­ mitted successively acquired modifications of structure or instinct to its progeny. It may well be asked, How is it possible to reconcile this case with the theory of natural selection ? First, let it be remembered that we have innumerable instances, both in our domestic productions and in those in a state of nature, of all sorts of differences of structure which have become correlated to certain ages, and to either sex. We have differences correlated not only to one sex, but to that short period alone when the reproductive system is active, as in the nuptial plumage of many birds, and in the hooked jaws of the male salmon. We have even slight differences in the horns of different breeds of cattle in relation to an artificially im­ perfect state of the male sex ; for oxen of certain breeds have longer horns than in other breeds, in comparison with the horns of the bulls or cows of these same breeds. Hence I can see no real difficulty in any character having become correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of insect-communities : the difficulty lies in understanding how such correlated modi­ fications of structure could have been slowly accumulated by natural selection. This difficulty, though appearing in­ superable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Thus, a well-flavoured vegetable is cooked, and the individual is destroyed; but the horticulturist sows seeds of the same stock, and confidently expects to get nearly the same variety: breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together; the animal has been slaughtered, but the breeder goes with con­ fidence to the same family. I have such faith in the powers of selection that I do not doubt that a breed of cattle, always yielding oxen with extraordinarily long horns, could be slowly formed by care­ fully watching which individual bulls and cows, when matched, produced oxen with the longest horns ; and yet no one ox could ever have propagated its kind. Thus I believe it has been with social insects : a slight modification of structure, or instinct, correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of the community, has been advantageous to the community: con­ sequently the fertile males and females of the same community flourished, and trans­ 99 mitted to their fertile offspring a tendency * to produce sterile members having the same modification. And I believe that this pro­ cess has been repeated, until that prc^ligious amount of difference between the fertile and sterile females of the same species has been produced, which we see in many social insects. But we have not as yet touched on the climax of the difficulty—namely, the fact that the neuters of several ants differ, not only from the fertile females and males, but from each other, sometimes to an almost incredible degree, and are thus divided into two or even three castes. The castes, moreover, do not generally graduate into each other, but are perfectly well defined; being as distinct from each other as are any two species of the same genus, or rather as any two genera of the same family. Thus in Eciton there are working and soldier neuters, with jaws and instinctsextraordinarily different ; in Cryptocerus the workers of one caste alone carry a wonderful sort of shield on their heads, the use of which is quite unknown ; in the Mexican Myrmecocystus the workers of one caste never leave the nest—they are fed by the workers of another caste, an-d they have an enormously developed abdomen, which secretes a sort of honey, supplying the place of that excreted by the aphides, or the domestic cattle as they may be called, which our European ants guard or imprison. It will indeed be thought that I have an. overweening confidence in the principle of’ natural selection when I do not admit that such wonderful and well-established factsat once annihilate my theory. I n the simpler case of neuter insects all of one caste or of the same kind, which have been rendered by natural selection, as I believe to be quite possible, different from the fertile males and females—in this case we may safely conclude from the analogy of ordinary variations that each successive, slight, profitable modification did not probably at first appear in all the individual neuters in the same nest, but in a few alone ; and that by the long-continued selection of the fertile parents which produced most neuters with the profitable modification, all the neuters ultimately came to have the desired character. On this view we ought occa­ sionally to find neuter-insects of the same species, in the same nest, presenting grada­ tions of structure ; and this we do find, even often, considering how few neuter­ insects out of Europe have been carefully �IOO ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES examined. Mr. F. Smith has shown how surprisingly the neuters of several British ants differ from each other in size, and sometimes in colour; and that the extreme forms can sometimes be perfectly linked together by individuals taken out of the same nest: I have myself compared per­ fect gradations of this kind. It often happens that the larger or the smaller sized workers are the most numerous ; or that both large and small are numerous, with those of an intermediate size scanty in numbers. Formica flava has larger and smaller workers, with some of intermediate size; and in this species, as Mr. F. Smith has observed, the larger workers have simple eyes (ocelli), which, though small, can be plainly distinguished, whereas the smaller workers have their ocelli rudi­ mentary. Having carefully dissected seve­ ral specimens of these workers, I can affirm that the eyes are far more rudi­ mentary in the smaller workers than can be accounted for merely by their propor­ tionally lesser size ; and- I fully believe, though I dare not assert so positively, that the workers of intermediate size have their ocelli in an exactly intermediate condition. So that we here have two bodies of sterile workers in the same nest, differing not only in size, but in their organs of vision,. yet connected by some few members in an intermediate condition. I may digress by adding that, if the smaller workers had been the most useful to the community, and those males and females had been continually selected, which produced more and more of the smaller workers, until all the workers had come to be in this condition; we should then have had a species of ant with neuters very nearly in the same condition with those of Myrmica. For the workers of Myrmica have not even rudiments of ocelli, though the male and female ants of this genus have welldeveloped ocelli. I may give another case : so confidently did I expect to find gradations in impor­ tant points of structure between the dif­ ferent castes of neuters in the same species that I gladly availed myself of Mr. F. Smith’s offer of numerous specimens from the same nest of the driver ant (Anomma) of West Africa. The reader will perhaps best appreciate the amount of difference in these workers by my giving not the actual measurements, but a strictly accurate illus­ tration : the difference was the same as if we were to see a set of workmen building a house of whom many were five feet four inches high and many sixteen feet high ; but we must suppose that the larger work­ men had heads four instead of three times as big as those of the smaller men, and jaws nearly five times as big. The jaws, moreover, of the working ants of the several sizes differed wonderfully in shape, and in the form and number of the teeth. But the important fact for us is that, though the workers can be grouped into castes of different sizes, yet they graduate insensibly into each other, as does the widely-different structure of their jaws. I speak confidently on this latter point, as Mr. Lubbock made drawings for me with the camera lucida of the jaws which I had dissected from the workers of the several sizes. With these facts before me, I believe that natural selection, by acting on the fertile parents, could form a species which should regularly produce neuters, either all of large size with one form of jaw, or all of small size with jaws having a widely different structure ; or lastly, and this is our climax of difficulty, one set of workers of one size and structure, and simultaneously another set of workers of a different size and structure—a graduated series having been first formed, as in the case of the driver ant, and then the extreme forms, from being the most useful to the com­ munity, having been produced in greater and greater numbers through the natural selection of the parents which generated them, until none with an intermediate structure were produced. Thus, as I believe, the wonderful fact of two distinctly defined castes of sterile workers existing in the same nest, both widely different from each other and from their parents, has originated. We can see how useful their production may have been to a social community of insects, on the same principle that the division of labour is useful to civilised man. As ants work by inherited instincts and by inherited organs or tools, and not by acquired know­ ledge and manufactured instruments, a perfect division of labour could be effected with them only by the workers being sterile ; for, had they been fertile, they would have intercrossed, and their instincts and struc­ ture would have become blended. And nature has, as I believe, effected this admir­ able division of labour in the communities of ants by the means of natural selection. But I am bound to confess that, with all my faith in this principle, I should never have anticipated that natural selection �INSTINCT could have been efficient in so high a degree had not the case of these neuter insects convinced me of the fact. I have, therefore, discussed this case, at some little but wholly insufficient length, in order to show the power of natural selection, and likewise because this is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered. The case, also, is very interesting, as it proves that with animals, as with plants, any amount of modification in structure can be effected by the accumu­ lation of numerous, slight, and, as we must call them, accidental variations, which are in any manner profitable, without exercise or habit having coming into play. For no amount of exercise, or habit, or volition, in the utterly sterile members of a community could possibly affect the structure or instincts of the fertile members, which alone leave descendants. I am surprised that no one has advanced this demonstra­ tive case of neuter insects against the wellknown doctrine of Lamarck. Summary.—I have endeavoured briefly in this chapter to show that the mental qualities of our domestic animals vary, and that the variations are inherited. Still more briefly I have attempted to show that instincts vary slightly in a state of nature. No one will dispute that instincts are of the highest importance to each animal. Therefore, 1 can see no difficulty, under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating slight modifications of instinct to any extent in any useful direction. In some cases habit or use and disuse have probably come into play. I do not pretend that the facts given in this chapter strengthen in any great degree my theory ; but none of the cases of difficulty, loi to the best of my judgment, annihilate it. On the other hand, the fact that instincts are not always absolutely perfect, and are liable to mistakes—that no instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others ; that the canon in natural history, of “ Natura non facit saltum,” is applicable to instincts as well as to corporeal structure, and is. plainly explicable on the foregoing views, but is otherwise inexplicable—all tend tocorroborate the theory of natural selection. This theory is, also, strengthened by some few other facts in regard to instincts ; as by that common case of closely-allied, but certainly distinct^ species, when in­ habiting distant parts of the world and living under considerably different con­ ditions of life, yet often retaining nearly the same instincts. For instance, we can understand, on the principle ofiinheritance, how it is that the thrush of South America, lines its nest with mud in the same peculiar manner as does our British thrush ; how it is that the male wrens (Troglodytes) of North America build “ cock-nests ;; to roost in, like the males of our distinct Kitty­ wrens—a habit wholly unlike that of any other known bird. Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers—ants making slaves—the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars—not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings— namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. • �102 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Chapter VIII. HYBRIDISM Distinction "between the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close inter-breeding, removed by domestication—Laws governing the sterility of hybrids—Sterility not a special '■-endowment, but incidental on other differences —-Causes of the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—Parallelism between the effects of ■ -changed conditions of life and crossing— Fertility of varieties when crossed and of their mongrel offspring not universal—Hybrids and mongrels compared independently of their fertility—Summary. The view generally entertained by natu­ ralists is that species, when intercrossed, have been specially endowed with the quality of sterility, in order to prevent the confusion of all organic forms. This view certainly seems at first probable, for species within the same country could hardly have kept distinct had they been capable of crossing freely. The importance of the fact that hybrids are very generally sterile has, I think, been much underrated by some late writers. On the theory of natural selection the case is especially important, inasmuch as the sterility of hybrids could not possibly be of any advantage to them, and therefore could not have been acquired by the continued preservation of successive profitable degrees of sterility. I hope, how­ ever, to be able to show that sterility is not a specially acquired or endowed quality, but is incidental on other acquired differ­ ences. In treating this subjeot, two classes of facts, to a large extent fundamentally different, have generally been confounded together; namely, the sterility of two species when first crossed, and the sterility of the hybrids produced from them. Pure species have of course their organs of reproduction in a perfect condition, yet when intercrossed they produce either few or no offspring. Hybrids, on the other hand, have their reproductive organs func­ tionally impotent, as may be clearly seen in the state of the male element in both plants and animals ; though the organs themselves are perfect in structure, as far as the microscope reveals. In the first case the two sexual elements which go to form the embryo are perfect; in the second case they are either not at all developed, or are imperfectly developed. This distinction is important, when the cause of the sterility, which is common to the two cases, has to be considered. The distinction has pro­ bably been slurred over, owing to the sterility in both cases being looked on as a special endowment, beyond the province of our reasoning powers. The fertility of varieties, that is of the forms known or believed to have descended from common parents, when intercrossed, and likewise the fertility of their mongrel offspring, is, on my theory, of equal im­ portance with the sterility of species ; for it seems to make a broad and clear distinc­ tion between varieties and species. First, for the sterility of species when crossed and of their hybrid offspring. It is impossible to study the several memoirs and works of those two conscientious and admirable observers, Kolreuterand Gartner, who almost devoted their lives to this subject, without being deeply impressed with the high generality of some degree of sterility. Kolreuter makes the rule uni­ versal ; but then he cuts the knot, for in ten cases in which he found two forms, considered by most authors as distinct species, quite fertile together, he unhesi­ tatingly ranks them as varieties. Gartner, also, makes the rule equally universal; and he disputes the entire fertility of Kolreuter’s ten cases. But in these and in many other cases Gartner is obliged carefully to count the seeds, in order to show that there is any degree of sterility. He always com­ pares the maximum number of seeds pro­ duced by two species when crossed, and by their hybrid offspring, with the average number produced by both pure parent­ species in a state of nature. But a serious cause of error seems to me to be here intro­ duced : a plant to be hybridised must be castrated, and, what is often more impor­ tant, must be secluded in order to prevent pollen being brought to it by insects from other plants. Nearly all the plants experimentised on by Gartner were potted, �HYBRIDISM and apparently were kept in a chamber in his house. That these processes aie often injurious to the fertility of a plant cannot be doubted ; for Gartner gives in his table about a score of cases of plants which he castrated, and artificially fertilised with their own pollen, and (excluding all cases such as the Leguminosae, in which there is an acknowledged difficulty in the manipula­ tion) half of these twenty plants had their fertility in some degree impaired. More­ over, as Gartner during several years repeatedly crossed the prirryose and cow­ slip, which we have such good reason to believe to be varieties, and only once or twice succeeded in getting fertile seed ; as he found the common red and blue pim­ pernels (Anagallis arvensis and ccerulea), which the best botanists rank as varieties, absolutely sterile together; and as he came to the same conclusion in several other analogous cases, it seems to me that we may well be permitted to doubt whether many other species are really so sterile, when intercrossed, as Gartner believes. It is certain, on the one hand, that the sterility of various species when crossed is so different in degree, and graduates away so insensibly, and, on the other hand, that the fertility of pure species is so easily affected by various circumstances, that for all practical purposes it is most difficult to say where perfect fertility ends and sterility begins. I think no better evidence of this can be required than that the two most experienced observers who have ever lived -—namely, Kblreuter and Gartner—should have arrived at diametrically opposite con­ clusions in regard to the very same species. It is also most instructive to compare— but I have not space here to enter on details—the evidence advanced by our best botanists on the question whether certain doubtful forms should be ranked as species or varieties with the evidence from fertility adduced by different hybridisers, or by the same author, from experiments made during different years. It can thus be shown that neither sterility nor fertility affords any' clear distinction between species and varieties; but that the evi­ dence from this source graduates away, and is doubtful in the same degree as is the evidence derived from other con­ stitutional and structural differences. In regard to the sterility of hybrids in successive generations; though Gartner was enabled to rear some hybrids, care­ fully guarding them from a cross with either pure parents, for six or seven, and 103 in one case for ten generations, yet he asserts positively that their fertility never increased, but generally greatly decreased. I do not doubt that this is usually the case, and that the fertility often suddenly de­ creases in the first few generations. Never­ theless, I believe that in all these experi­ ments the fertility has been diminished by an independent cause—namely, from close interbreeding. I have collected so large a body of facts, showing that close interbreeding lessens fertility, and, on the other hand, that an occasional cross with a distinct individual or variety increases fer­ tility, that I cannot doubt the correctness of this almost universal belief among breeders. Hybrids are seldom raised by experimentalists in great numbers ; and as the parent-species, or other allied hybrids, generally grow in the same garden, the visits of insects must be carefully prevented during the flowering season; hence hybrids will generally be fertilised during each generation by their own individual pollen ; and I am convinced that this would be injurious to their fertility, already lessened by their hybrid origin. I am strengthened in this conviction by a remarkable state­ ment repeatedly made by Gartner—namely, that, if even the less fertile hybrids be artificially fertilised with hybrid pollen of the same kind, their fertility, notwith­ standing the frequent ill effects of mani­ pulation, sometimes decidedly increases, and goes on increasing. Now, in artificial fertilisation pollen is as often taken by chance (as I know from my own expe­ rience) from the anthers of another flower as from the anthers of the flower itself which is to be fertilised ; so that a cross between two flowers, though probably on the same plant, would be thus effected. Moreover, whenever complicated experi­ ments are in progress, so careful an ob­ server as Gartner would have castrated his hybrids, and this would have insured in each generation a cross with a pollen from a distinct flower, either from the same plant or from another plant of the same hybrid nature. And thus the strange fact of the increase of fertility in the successive generations of artificially fertilised hybrids may, I believe, be ac­ counted for by close interbreeding having been avoided. Now let us turn to the results arrived at by the third most experienced hybridiser —namely, the Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert. He is as emphatic in his conclusion that some hybrids are perfectly fertile—as fertile �104 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES as the pure parent-species—as are Kolplants in these experiments appeared per­ reuter and Gartner that some degree of fectly healthy, and although both the ovules sterility between distinct species is a uni­ and pollen of the same flower were per­ versal law of nature. He experimentised fectly good with respect to other species, on some of the very same species as did yet, as they were functionally imperfect in Gartner. The difference in their results their mutual self-action, we must infer that may, I think, be in part accounted for the plants were in an unnatural state. by Herbert’s great horticultural skill, Nevertheless, these facts show on what and by his having hothouses at his com­ slight and mysterious causes the lesser or mand. Of his many important statements greater fertility of species when crossed, I will here give only a single one as an in comparison with the same species when example—namely, that “ every ovule in a self-fertilised, sometimes depends. pod of Crinum capense fertilised by C. The practical experiments of horticul­ revolutum produced a plant, which (he turists, though not made with scientific says) I never saw to occur in a case of precision, deserve some notice. It is its natural fecundation.” So that we here notorious in how complicated a manner have perfect, or even more than commonly the species of Pelargonium, Fuchsia, Cal­ perfect, fertility in a first cross between ceolaria, Petunia, Rhododendron, etc., have two distinct species. been crossed, yet many of these hybrids This case of the Crinum leads me to seed freely. For instance, Herbert asserts refer to a most singular fact—namely, that that a hybrid from Calceolaria integrifolia there are individual plants of certain and plantaginea, species most widely dis­ species of Lobelia and of some other similar in general habit, “reproduced itself genera, which can be far more easily as perfectly as if it had been a natural fertilised by the pollen of another and species from the mountains of Chile.” I distinct species than by their own pollen ; have taken some pains to ascertain the and all the individuals of nearly all the degree of fertility of some of the complex species of Hippeastrum seem to be in this crosses of Rhododendrons, and I am predicament. For these plants have been assured that many of them are perfectly found to yield seed to the pollen of a fertile. Mr. C. Noble, for instance, informs distinct species, though quite sterile with me that he raises stocks for grafting from their own pollen, notwithstanding that their a hybrid between Rhod. Ponticum and own pollen was found to be perfectly good, Catawbiense, and that this hybrid “seeds as freely as it is possible to imagine.” Had for it fertilised distinct species. So that hybrids, when fairly treated, gone on certain individual plants and all the indi­ viduals of certain species can actually be I decreasing in fertility in each successive generation, as Gartner believes to be the hybridised much more readily than they case, the fact would have been notorious can be self-fertilised 1 For instance, a bulb to nurserymen. Horticulturists raise large of Hippeastrum aulicum produced four beds of the same hybrids, and such alone flowers; three were fertilised by Herbert are fairly treated, for by insect agency the with their own pollen, and the fourth was several individuals of the same hybrid subsequently fertilised by the pollen of a variety are allowed to freely cross with compound hybrid descended from three each other, and the injurious influence other and distinct species : the result was of close interbreeding is thus prevented. that “ the ovaries of the three first flowers Anyone may readily convince himself of soon ceased to grow, and after a few days the efficiency of insect-agency by examining perished entirely, whereas the pod impreg­ the flowers of the more sterile kinds of nated by the pollen of the hybrid made hybrid rhododendrons, which produce no vigorous growth and rapid progress to pollen, for he will find on their stigmas maturity, and bore good seed, which plenty of pollen brought from other flowers. vegetated freely.” In a letter to me, in In regard to animals, much fewer experi­ 1839, Mr. Herbert told me that he had ments have been carefully tried than with then tried the experiment during five years, plants. If our systematic arrangements and he continued to try it during' several can be trusted—that is, if the genera of subsequent years, and always with the animals are as distinct from each other as same result. This result has also been are the genera of plants—then we may confirmed by other observers in the case infer that animals more widely separated of Hippeastrum with its sub-g-enera, and in the scale of nature can be more easily in the case of some other g-enera, as Lobelia, crossed than in the case of plants ; but the Passiflora, and Verbascum/ Although the �HYBRIDISM J05 crossed geese are kept in various parts of hybrids themselves are, I think, more the country ; and as they are kept for sterile. I doubt whether any case of a profit, where neither pure parent-species perfectly fertile hybrid animal can be con­ exists, they must certainly be highly fertile. sidered as thoroughly well authenticated. A doctrine which originated with Pallas It should, however, be borne in mind that, has been largely accepted by modern owing to few animals breeding freely under confinement, few experiments have been naturalists—namely, that most of our domestic animals have descended from two fairly tried : for instance, the canary-bird has been crossed with nine other finches, or more wild species, since commingled by intercrossing. On this view, the aboriginal but, as not one of these nine species breeds species must either at first have produced freely in •confinement, we have no right to expect that the first crosses between them I quite fertile hybrids, or the hybrids must and the canary, or that their hybrids, should ! have become in subsequent generations quite fertile under domestication. This be perfectly fertile. Again, with respect to latter alternative seems to me the most the fertility in successive generations of the more fertile hybrid animals, I hardly know probable, and I am inclined to believe in of an instance in which two families of the its truth, although it rests on no direct same hybrid have been raised at the same evidence. I believe, for instance, that our time from different parents, so as to avoid dogs have descended from several wild the ill effects of close interbreeding'. On stocks ; yet, with perhaps the exception of the contrary, brothers and sisters have certain indigenous domestic dogs of South usually been crossed in each successive America, all are quite fertile together; and generation, m opposition to the constantly analogy makes me greatly doubt whether repeated admonition of every breeder. the several aboriginal species would at first And in this case it is not at all surprising have freely bred together and have pro­ that the inherent sterility in the hybrids duced quite fertile hybrids. So, again, there should have gone on increasing. If we is reason to believe that our European and were to act thus, and pair brothers and the humped Indian cattle are quite fertile sisters in the case of any pure animal, which together ; but, from facts communicated to from any cause had the least tendency to me by Mr. Blyth, I think they must be sterility, the breed would assuredly be lost considered as distinct species. On this in a very few generations. view of the origin of many of our domestic Although I do not know of any thoroughly animals, we must either give up the belief well-authenticated cases of perfectly fertile of the almost universal sterility of distinct hybrid animals, I have some reason to species of animals when crossed, or we believe that the hybrids from Cervulus must look at sterility, not as an indelible vaginalis and Reevesii, and from Phasianus characteristic, but as one capable of being colchicus with P. torquatus and P. versi­ removed by domestication. color are perfectly fertile. There is no Finally, looking to all the ascertained doubt that these three pheasants—namely, facts on the intercrossing of plants and the common, the true ring-necked, and the animals, it may be concluded that some Japan — intercross, and are.- becomingdegree of sterility, both in first crosses and blended together in the woods of several in hybrids, is an extremely general result, parts of England. The hybrids from the but that it cannot, under our present state common and Chinese geese (A. cygnoides), of knowledge, be considered as absolutely species, which are so different that universal. they are generally ranked in distinct genera, have often bred in this country Laws governing the Sterility of first with either pure parent, and in one Crosses and of Hybrids.—We will now single instance they have bred inter se, consider a little more in detail the circum­ This was effected by Mr. Eyton, who stances and rules governing the sterility of raised two hybrids from the same parents, first crosses and of hybrids. Our chief but from different hatches ; and from object will be to see whether or not the these two birds he raised no less than rules indicate that species have specially eight hybrids (grandchildren of the pure been endowed with this quality, in order to geese) from one nest. In India, however, prevent their crossing and blending to­ these cross-bred geese must be far more gether ifi utter confusion. The following fertile, for I am assured by two eminently rules and conclusions are chiefly drawn capable judges—namely, Mr. Blyth and up from Gartner’s admirable work on the Captain Hutton—that whole flocks of these hybridisation of plants. I have taken �io6 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES much pains to ascertain how far the rules apply to animals; and, considering how scanty our knowledge is in regard to hybrid animals, I have been surprised to find how generally the same rules apply to both kingdoms. It has been already remarked that the degree of fertility, both of first crosses and of hybrids, graduates from zero to perfect fertility. It is surprising in how many curious ways this gradation can be shown to exist; but only the barest outline of the facts can here be given. When pollen from a plant of one family is placed on the stigma of a plant of a distinct family, it exerts no more influence than so much inorganic dust. From this absolute zero of fertility the pollen of different species of the same genus, applied to the stigma of some one species, yields a perfect gradation in the number of seeds produced, up to nearly complete, or even quite complete, fertility ; and, as we have seen, in certain abnormal cases, even to an excess of fertility beyond , that which the plant’s own pollen will pro­ duce. So in hybrids themselves there are some which never have produced, and probably never would produce, even with the pollen of either pure parent, a single fertile seed ; but in some of these cases a first trace of fertility may be detected by the pollen of one of the pure parent­ species causing the flower of the hybrid to wither earlier than it otherwise would have done; and the early withering of the flower is well known to be a sign of incipient fertilisation. From this extreme degree of sterility we have self-fertilised hybrids producing a greater and greater number of seeds up to perfect fertility. Hybrids from two species which are very difficult to cross, and which rarely produce any offspring, are generally very sterile; but the parallelism between the difficulty of making a first cross and the sterility of the hybrid thus produced—two classes of facts which are generally con­ founded together—is by no means strict. There are many cases in which two pure species can be united with unusual facility, and produce numerous hybrid-offspring; yet these hybrids are remarkably sterile. On the other hand, there are species which can be crossed very rarely, or with extreme difficulty; but the hybrids, when at last produced, are very fertile. Even within the limits of the same genus—for instance, in Dianthus—these two opposite cases occur. The fertility, both of first crosses and of hybrids, is more easily affected by un­ favourable conditions than is the fertility of pure species. But the degree of fertility is likewise innately variable ; for it is not always the *sarne when the same two species are crossed under the same circum­ stances, but depends in part upon the con­ stitution of the individuals which happen to have been chosen for the experiment. So it is with hybrids, for their degree of fertility is often found to differ greatly in the several individuals raised from seed out of the same capsule and exposed to exactly the same conditions. By the term systematic affinity is meant the resemblance between species in struc­ ture and in constitution, more especially in the structure of parts -which are of high physiological importance, and which differ little in the allied species. Now, the fertility of first crosses between species, and of the hybrids produced from them, is largely governed by their systematic affinity. This is clearly shown by hybrids never having been raised between species ranked by systematists in distinct families ; and, on the other hand, by very closely-allied species generally uniting with facility. But the correspondence between syste­ matic affinity and the facility of crossing is by no means strict. A multitude of cases could be given of very closely-allied species which will not unite, or only with extreme difficulty ; and, on the other hand, of very distinct species which unite with the utmost facility. In the same family there may be a genus, as Dianthus, in which very many species can most readily be crossed; and another genus, as Silene, in which the most persevering efforts have failed to produce between extremely close species a single hybrid. Even within the limits of the same genus we meet with this same difference ; for instance, the many species of Nicotiana have been more largely crossed than the species of almost any other genus ; but Gartner found that N. acuminata, which is not a particularly dis­ tinct species, obstinately failed to fertilise, or to be fertilised by, no less than eight other species of Nicotiana. Very many analogous facts could be given. No one has been able to point out what kind, or what amount, of difference in any recognisable character is sufficient to pre­ vent two species crossing. It can be shown that plants most widely different in habit and general appearance, and having strongly marked differences in every part of the flower, even in the pollen, in the fruit, and �HYBRIDISM in the cotyledons, can be crossed. Annual and perennial plants, deciduous and ever­ green trees, plants inhabiting different stations and fitted for extremely different climates, can often be crossed with ease. By a reciprocal cross between two species —-I mean the case, for instance, of a stallion­ horse being first crossed with a female-ass, and then a male-ass with a mare : these two species may then be said to have been reciprocally crossed. There is often the widest possible difference in the facility of making reciprocal crosses. Such cases are highly important, for they prove that the capacity in any two species to cross is often completely independent of their systematic affinity, or of any recognisable difference in their whole organisation. On the other hand, these cases clearly show that the capacity for crossing is connected with constitutional differences impercep­ tible by us, and confined to the reproduc­ tive system. This difference in the result of reciprocal crosses between the same two species was long ago observed by Kolreuter. To give an instance : Mirabilis jalapa can easily be fertilised by the pollen of M. longiflora, and the hybrids thus produced are sufficiently fertile ; but Kolreuter tried more than two hundred times, during eight following years, to fertilise reciprocally M. longiflora with the pollen of M. jalapa, and utterly failed. Several other equally striking cases could be given. Thuret has observed the same fact with certain sea­ weeds or Fuci. Gartner, moreover, found that this difference of facility in making reciprocal crosses is extremely common in a lesser degree. He has observed it even between forms so closely related (as Matthiola annua and glabra) that many botanists rank them only as varieties. It is also a remarkable fact that hybrids raised from reciprocal crosses, though, of course, compounded of the very same two species, the one species having first been used as the father and then as the mother, generally differ in fertility in a small, and occasionally in a high, degree. Several other singular rules could be given from Gartner: for instance, some species have a remarkable power of crossing with other species ; other species of the same genus have a remarkable power of impressing their likeness on their hybrid offspring ; but these two powers do not at all necessarily go together. There are certain hybrids which, instead of having, as is usual, an intermediate character between their two parents, always closely 107 resemble one of them ; and such hybrids, though externally so like one of their pure parent-species, are with rare exceptions extremely sterile. So again among hybrids, which are usually intermediate in structure between their parents, exceptional and abnormal individuals sometimes are born, which closely resemble one of their pure parents; and these hybrids are almost always utterly sterile, even when the otherhybrids raised from seed from the same capsule have a considerable degree of fertility. These facts show how completely fertility in the hybrid is independent of its external resemblance to either pure parent. Considering the several rules now given, which govern the fertility of first crosses and of hybrids, we see that when forms,„ which must be considered as good anddistinct species, are united, their fertility graduates from zero to perfect fertility, or" even to fertility under certain conditions in excess. That their fertility, besides being eminently susceptible to favourable and un­ favourable conditions, is innately variable. That it is by no means always the same in degree in the first cross and in the hybrids produced from this cross. That the fertility of hybrids is not related to the degree in which they resemble in external appearance either parent. And, lastly, that the facility of making a first cross between any twospecies is not always governed by their systematic affinity or degree of resem­ blance to each other. This latter state­ ment is clearly proved by reciprocal, crosses between the same two species, for, according as the one species or the other is used as the father or the mother, there is generally some difference, and occa­ sionally the widest possible difference, in the facility of effecting an union. The hybrids, moreover, produced from recip­ rocal crosses often differ in fertility. Now, do these complex and singular rules indicate that species have been endowed with sterility simply to prevent their be­ coming confounded in nature ? I think not. For why should the sterility be so extremely different in degree, when various species are crossed, all of which we must suppose it would be equally important to keep from blending together ? Why should the degree of sterility be innately variable in the individuals of the same species ? Why should some species cross with facility, and yet produce very sterile hybrids; and other species cross with extreme difficulty, and yet produce fairly �ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES fertile hybrids? Why should there often be so great a difference in the result of a reciprocal cross between the same two species? Why, it may even be asked, has the production of hybrids been permitted ? To grant to species the special power of producing hybrids, and then to stop their further propagation by different degrees of sterility, not strictly related to the facility of the first union between their parents, seems to be a strange arrangement The foregoing rules and facts, on th’e other hand, appear to me clearly to indi­ cate that the sterility both of first crosses and of hybrids is simply incidental or dependent on unknown differences, chiefly in the reproductive systems, of the species which are crossed. The differences being •of so peculiar and limited a nature that, in reciprocal crosses between two species, the male sexual element of the one will •often freely act on the female sexual ele­ ment of the other, but not in a reversed direction. It will be advisable to explain a little more fully by an example what I mean by sterility being incidental on other differences, and not a specially endowed quality. As the capacity of one plant to be grafted or budded on another is so entirely unimportant for its welfare in a state of nature, I presume that no one will suppose that this capacity is a specially endowed quality, but will admit that it is incidental on differences in the laws of growth of the two plants. We can sometimes see the reason why one tree will not take on another, from differences in their rate of growth, in the hardness of their wood, in the period of the flow or nature of their sap, etc.; but in a multitude of cases we can assign no reason whatever. Great diversity in the size of two plants, one being woody and the other herbaceous, one being evergreen and the other de­ ciduous, and adaptation to widely different climates, does not always prevent the two grafting together. As in hybridisation, so with grafting, the capacity is limited by systematic affinity, for no one has been able to graft trees together belonging to quite distinct families ; and, on the other hand, closely allied species, and varieties of the same species, can usually, but not invariably, be grafted with ease. But this capacity, as in hybridisation, is by no means absolutely governed by systematic affinity. Although many distinct genera within the same family have been grafted together, in other cases species of the same genus will not take on each other. I | . j ; | ! ; > I I j | i < ' ! | : | i The pear can be grafted far more readily on the quince, which is ranked as a distinct genus, than on the apple, which is a member of the same genus. Even different varieties of the pear take with different degrees of facility on the quince; so do ’different varieties of the apricot and peach on certain varieties of the plum. As Gartner found that there was some­ times an innate difference in different indi­ viduals of the same two species in crossing, so Sagaret believes this to be the case with different individuals of the same two species in being grafted together. As, in reciprocal crosses, the facility of effecting an union is often very far from equal, so it sometimes is in grafting ; the common gooseberry, for instance, cannot be grafted on the currant, whereas the currant will take, though with difficulty, on the goose­ berry. We have seen that the sterility of hybrids, which have their reproductive organs in an imperfect condition, is a very different case from the difficulty of uniting two pure species, which have their reproductive organs perfect; yet these two distinct cases run to a certain extent parallel. Something analogous occurs in grafting; for Thouin found that three species of Robinia, which seeded freely on their own roots, and which could be grafted with no great difficulty on another species, when thus grafted were rendered barren. On the other hand, certain species of Sorbus, when grafted on other species, yielded twice as much fruit as when on their own roots. We arc reminded by this latter fact of the extra­ ordinary case of Hippeastrum, Lobelia, etc., which seeded much more freely when fertilised with the pollen of distinct species than when self-fertilised with their own pollen. We thus see that, although there is a clear and fundamental difference between the mere adhesion of grafted stocks and the union of the male and female elements in the act of reproduction, yet that there is a rude degree of parallelism in the results of grafting and of crossing distinct species. And as we must look at the curious and complex laws governing the facility with which trees can be grafted on each other as incidental or unknown differences in their vegetative systems, so I believe that the still more complex laws governing the facility of first crosses are incidental on unknown differences chiefly in their repro­ ductive systems. These differences, in both cases, follow to a certain extent, as �HYBRIDISM 109 long as it is nourished within its mother’s womb or within the egg or seed produced by the mother, it may be exposed to condi­ tions in some degree unsuitable, and con­ sequently be liable to perish at an early period ; more especially as all very young beings seem eminently sensitive to injurious or unnatural conditions of life. In regard to the sterility of hybrids, in which the sexual elements are imperfectly developed, the case is very different. I have more than once alluded to a large body of facts, which I have collected, show­ Causes of ike Sterility offirst Crosses an d ing that, when animals and plants are of Hybrids.—We may now look a little removed from their natural conditions, they closer at the probable causes of the sterility are extremely liable to have their repro­ of first crosses and of hybrids. These two ductive systems seriously affected. This, cases are fundamentally different, for, as just in fact, is the great bar to the domestica­ remarked, in the union of two pure species tion of animals. Between the sterility thus the male and female sexual elements are superinduced and that of hybrids there are perfect, whereas in hybrids they are im- j many points of similarity. In both cases perfect. Even in first crosses the greater i the sterility is independent of general health, or lesser difficulty in effecting a union ' and is often accompanied by excess of size apparently depends on several distinct or great luxuriance. In both cases the causes. There must sometimes be a sterility occurs in various degrees; in both’, physical impossibility in the male element the male element is the most liable to be reaching the ovule, as would be the case affected, but sometimes the female more with a plant having a pistil too long for than the male. In both the tendency goes, the pollen-tubes to reach the ovarium. It to a certain extent, with systematic affinity, has also been observed that when pollen for whole groups of animals and plants are of one species is placed on the stigma of rendered impotent by the same unnatural a distinctly allied species, though the pollen conditions ; and whole groups of species tubes protrude, they do not penetrate the tend to produce sterile hybrids. On the stigrnatic surface. Again, the male element other hand, one species in a group will may reach the female element, but be sometimes resist great changes of conditions incapable of causing an embryo to be with unimpared fertility, and certain species developed, as seems to have been the case in a group will produce unusually fertile with some of Thuret’s experiments on Fuci. hybrids. No one can tell, till he tries, No explanation cam be given of these facts,- whether any particular animal will breed any more than why certain trees cannot be under confinement or any exotic plant seed grafted on others. Lastly, an embryo may freely under culture; nor can he tell, till he be developed, and then perish at an early tries, whether any two species of a genus period. This latter alternative has not been will produce more or less sterile hybrids. sufficiently attended to; but I believe, from Lastly, when organic beings are placed observations communicated to me by Mr. during several generations under conditions Hewitt, who has had great experience in not natural to them, they are extremely hybridising gallinaceous birds, that the liable to vary, which is due, as I believe, to early death of the embryo is a very frequent their reproductive systems having been cause of sterility in first crosses. I was at specially affected, though in a lesser degree first very unwilling to believe in this view, than when sterility ensues. So it is with as hybrids, when once born, are generally hybrids, for hybrids in successive gene­ healthy and long-lived, as we see in the rations are eminently liable to vary, as every case of the common mule. Hybrids, how­ experimentalist has observed. ever, are differently circumstanced before Thus we see that when organic beings and after birth : when born and living in a are placed under new and unnatural con­ country where their two parents can live, ditions, and when hybrids are produced by they are generally placed under suitable the unnatural crossing of two species, the conditions of life. But a hybrid partakes reproductive system, independently of the of only half of the nature and constitution general state of health, is affected by sterility of its mother, and therefore before birth, as in a very similar manner. In the one case might have been expected, systematic affinity, by which every kind of resemblance and dissimilarity between organic beings is attempted to be expressed. The facts by no means seem to me to indicate that the greater or lesser difficulty of either grafting or crossing together various species has been a special endowment; although in the case of crossing the difficulty is as important for the endurance and stability of specific forms as in the case of grafting it is unimportant for their welfare. �no ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES the conditions of life have been disturbed, though often in so slight a degree as to be inappreciable by us ; in the other case, or that of hybrids, the external conditions have remained the same, but the organisation has been disturbed by two different structures and constitutions having been blended into one. For it is scarcely pos­ sible that two organisations should be com­ pounded into one without some disturbance occurring in the development, or periodical action, or mutual relation of the different parts and organs one to another, or to the conditions of life. When hybrids are able io breed inter se, they transmit to their off­ spring from generation to generation the same compounded organisation, and hence we need not be surprised that their sterility, though in some degree variable, rarely diminishes. It must, however, be confessed that we •cannot understand, excepting on vague hypotheses, several facts with respect to the sterility of hybrids; for instance, the Unequal fertility of hybrids produced from reciprocal crosses; or the increased sterility in those hybrids which occa­ sionally and exceptionally resemble closely cither pure parent. Nor do I pretend that the foregoing remarks go to the root of the matter : no explanation is offered why an organism, when placed under unnatural -conditions, is rendered sterile. All that I have attempted to show is that in two cases, in some respects allied, sterility is the common result—in the one case from the conditions of life having been disturbed, in the other case from the organisation having been disturbed by two organisations having been compounded into one. It may seem fanciful, but I suspect that a similar parallelism extends to an allied yet very different class of facts. It is an old and almost universal belief, founded, I think, on a considerable body of evidence, that slight changes in the conditions of life are beneficial to all living things. We see this acted on by farmers and gardeners in their frequent exchanges of seeds, tubers, ■etc., from one soil or climate to another, and back again. During the convalescence of animals we plainly see that great benefit is derived from almost any change in the habits of life. Again, both with plants and animals, there is abundant evidence that a cross between very distinct individuals of the same species—that is, between members of different strains or sub-breeds—gives vigour and fertility to the offspring. I believe, indeed, from the facts alluded to in» I our fourth chapter, that a certain amount ■ of crossing is indispensable even with her­ maphrodites; and that close interbreeding i continued during several generations be­ tween the nearest relations, especially if these be kept under the same conditions of life, always induces weakness and sterility • in the progeny. Hence it seems that, on the one hand, slight changes in the conditions of life benefit all organic beings, and, on the other hand, that slight crosses—that is, crosses between the males and females of the same species which have varied and become slightly different—give vigour and fertility to their offspring. But we have seen that greater changes, or changes of a particular nature, often render organic beings in some degree sterile ; and that greater crosses— that is, crosses between males and females which have become widely or specifically different—produce hybrids which are gene­ rally sterile in some degree. I cannot persuade myself that this parallelism is an accident or an illusion. Both series of facts seem to be connected together by some common but unknown bond, which is essentially related to the principle of life. Fertility of Varieties when crossed, and of their Mongrel offspring.—It may be I ; ' i I urged, as a most forcible argument, that there must be some essential distinction between species and varieties, and that there must be some error in all the fore­ going remarks, inasmuch as varieties, how­ ever much they may differ from each other in external appearance, cross with perfect facility, and yield perfectly fertile offspring. I fully admit that this is almost invariably the case. But if we look to varieties pro­ duced under nature, we are immediately involved in hopeless difficulties ; for if two hitherto reputed varieties be found in any degree sterile together, they are at once ranked by most naturalists as species. For instance, the blue and red pimpernel, the primrose and cowslip, which are con­ sidered by many of our best botanists as varieties, are said by Gartner not to be quite fertile when crossed, and he conse­ quently ranks them as undoubted species. If we thus argue in a circle, the fertility of all varieties produced under nature will assuredly have to be granted. If we turn to varieties, produced, or supposed to have been produced, under domestication, we are still involved in doubt. For when it is stated, for instance, that the German Spitz dog unites more �HYBRIDISM easily than other dogs with foxes, or that certain South American indigenous domes-, tic dogs do not readily cross with European dogs, the explanation which will occur to every one, and probably the true one, is that these dogs have descended from severalaboriginally-distinct species. Never­ theless, the perfect fertility of so many domestic varieties, differing widely from each other in appearance—for instance, of the pigeon or of the cabbage—is a remark­ able fact, more especially when we reflect how many species there are which, though resembling each other most closely, are utterly sterile when intercrossed. Several considerations, however, render the fertility of domestic varieties less remarkable than at first appears. It can, in the first place, be clearly shown that mere external dis­ similarity between two species does not determine their greater or lesser degree of sterility when crossed, and we may apply the same rule to domestic varieties. In the second place, some eminent naturalists believe that a long course of domestication tends to eliminate sterility in the successive generations of hybrids which were at first only slightly sterile ; and, if this be so, we surely ought not to expect to find sterility both appearing and disappearing under nearly the same conditions of life. Lastly, and this seems to me by far the most important consideration, new races of animals and plants are produced under domestication by man’s methodical and unconscious power of selection, for his own use and pleasure : he neither wishes to select, nor could select, slight differences in the reproductive system, or other con­ stitutional differences correlated with the reproductive system. He supplies his several varieties with the same food ; treats them in nearly the same manner, and does not wish to alter their general habits of life. Nature acts uniformly and slowly during vast periods of time on the whole organisation, in any way which may be for each creature’s own good ; and thus she may, either directly or more probably indirectly, through correlation, modify the reproductive system in the several descen­ dants from any one species. Seeing this difference in the process of selection, as carried on by man and nature, we need not be surprised at some difference in the result. I have as yet spoken as if the varieties of the same species were invariably fertile when intercrossed. But it seems to me impossible to resist the evidence of the in existence of a certain amount of sterility in the few following cases, which I will briefly abstract. The evidence is, at least, as good as that from which we believe in the sterility of a multitude of species. The evidence is also derived from hostile witnesses, who in all other cases consider fertility and sterility as safe criterions of specific distinction. Gartner kept, during several years, a dwarf kind of maize with yellow seeds, and a tall variety with red seeds, growing near each other in his garden; and, although these plants have separated sexes, they never naturally crossed. He then fertilised thirteen flowers of the one with the pollen of the other; but only a single head produced any seed, and this one head produced only five grains. Manipulation in this case could not have been injurious, as the plants have separated sexes. No one, I believe, has suspected that these varieties of maize are distinct species ; and it is important to notice that the hybrid plants thus raised were themselves perfectly fertile ; so that even Gartner did not venture to consider the two varieties as specifically distinct. Girou de Buzareingues crossed three varieties of gourd, which, like the maize, has separated sexes, and he asserts that their mutual fertilisation is by so much the less easy as their differences are greater. How far these experiments may be trusted I know not; but the forms experimentised on are ranked by Sagaret, who mainly founds his classification by the test of infertility, as varieties. The following case is far more remark­ able, and seems at first quite incredible; but it is the result of an astonishing number of experiments made during many years on nine species of Verbascum by so good an observer and so hostile a witness as Gartner—namely, that yellow and white varieties of the same species of Verbascum when intercrossed produce less seed than do either coloured varieties when fertilised with pollen from their own coloured flowers. Moreover, he asserts that, when yellow and white varieties of one species are crossed with yellow and white varieties of a dis­ tinct species, more seed is produced by the crosses between the similarly-coloured flowers than between those which are dif­ ferently coloured. Yet these varieties of Verbascum present no other difference besides the mere colour of the flower ; and one variety can sometimes be raised from the seed of the other. From observations which I have made �112 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES on certain varieties of hollyhock, I am inclined to suspect that they present analo­ gous facts. Kolreuter, whose accuracy has been con­ firmed by every subsequent observer, has proved the remarkable fact that one variety of the common tobacco is more fertile, when crossed with a widely distinct species, than are the othervarieties. He experimentised on five forms, which are commonly reputed to be varieties, and which he tested by the severest trial—namely, by reciprocal crosses—and he found their mongrel off­ spring perfectly fertile. But one of these five varieties, when used either as father or mother, and crossed with the Nicotiana glutinosa, always yielded hybrids not so sterile as those which were produced from the four other varieties when crossed with N. glutinosa. Hence the reproductive system of this one variety must have been in some manner and in some degree modified. From these facts; from the great diffi­ culty of ascertaining theinfertilityof varieties in a state of nature, for a supposed variety, if infertile in any degree, would generally be ranked as species; from man selecting only external characters in the production of the most distinct domestic varieties, and from not wishing or being able to produce recon­ dite and functional differences in the repro­ ductive system—from these several con­ siderations and facts, I do not think that the very general fertility of varieties can be proved to be of universal occurrence, or to form a fundamental distinction between varieties and species. The general fertility of varieties does not seem to me sufficient to overthrow the view which I have taken with respect to the very general, but not invariable, sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—namely, that it is not a special endowment, but is incidental on slowlyacquired modifications, more especially in the reproductive systems of the forms which are crossed. Hybrids and Mongrels compared, indepen­ dently of their fertility.-—Independently of the question of fertility, the offspring of species when crossed and of varieties when crossed may be compared in several other respects. Gartner, whose strong wish was to draw a marked line of distinction between species and varieties, could; find very few and, as it seems to me, quite unim­ portant differences between the so-called hybrid offspring of species and the so-called mongrel offspring of varieties. And, on the other hand, they agree most closely in very many important respects. I shall here discuss this subject with extreme brevity. The most important dis­ tinction is that in the first generation mongrels are more variable than hybrids; but Gartner admits that hybrids from species which have long been cultivated are often variable in the first generation ; and I have myself seen striking instances of this. fact. Gartner further admits that hybrids between very closely-allied species are more variable than those from very dis­ tinct species; and this shows that the difference in the degree of variability graduates away. When mongrels and the more fertile hybrids are propagated for several generations, an extreme amount of variability in their offspring is notorious ; but some few cases both of hybrids and mongrels long retaining uniformity of char­ acter could be given. The variability, however, in the successive generation^ of mongrels is, perhaps, greater than in hybrids. This greater variability of mongrels than of hybrids does not seem to me at all sur­ prising. For the parents of mongrels are varieties, and mostly domestic varieties (very few experiments having been tried on natural varieties), and this implies in most cases that there has been recent variability; and therefore we might expect that such variability would often continue and be super-added to that arising from the mere act of crossing. The slight degree of variability in hybrids from the first cross or in the first generation, in contrast with their extreme variability in the succeeding genera­ tions, is a curious fact and deserves atten­ tion. For it bears on and corroborates the view which I have taken on the cause of ordinary variability—namely, that it is due to the reproductive system being eminently sensitive to any change in the conditions of life, being thus often rendered either im­ potent or at least incapable of its proper function of producing offspring identical with the parent-form. Now, hybrids in the first generation are descended from species (excluding those long cultivated) which have not had their reproductive systems in any way affected, and they are not vari­ able ; but hybrids themselves have their reproductive systems seriously affected, and their descendants are highly variable. But to return to our comparison of mongrels and hybrids : Gartner states that mongrels are more liable than hybrids to revert to either parentrform ; but this, if it �HYBRIDISM be true, is certainly only a difference in degree. Gartner further insists that when any two species, although most closely allied to each other, are crossed with a third species, the hybrids are widely dif­ ferent from each other ; whereas, if two - very distinct varieties of one species are crossed with another species, the hybrids do not differ much. But this conclusion, as far as I can make out, is founded on a single experiment, and seems directly opposed to the results of several experi­ ments made by Kolreuter. These alone are the unimportant differ­ ences which Gartner is able to point out between hybrid and mongrel plants. On the other hand, the resemblance in mongrels and in hybrids to their respective parents, more especially in hybrids produced from nearly-related species, follows, according to Gartner, the same laws. When two species are crossed, one has sometimes a pre­ potent power of impressing its likeness on the hybrid; and so I believe it to be with varieties of plants. With animals one variety certainly often has this prepotent power over another variety. Hybrid plants produced from a reciprocal cross generally resemble each other closely ; and so it is with mongrels from a reciprocal cross. Both hybrids and mongrels can be reduced to either pure parent-form by repeated crosses in successive generations with either parent. These several remarks are apparently applicable to animals ; but the subject is here excessively complicated, partly owing to the existence of secondary sexual char­ acters, but more espec#dly owing to pre­ potency in transmitting likeness running more strongly in one sex than in the other both when one species is crossed with another and when one variety is crossed with another variety. For instance, I think those authors are right who main­ tain that the ass has a prepotent power over the horse, so that both the mule and the hinny more resemble the ass than the horse ; but that the prepotency runs more strongly in the male-ass than in the female, so that the mule, which is the offspring of j the male-ass and mare, is more like an ass than is the hinny, which is the offspring of the female-ass and stallion. ■ Much stress has been laid by some authors on the supposed fact that mongrel animals alone are born closely like one of their parents; but it can be shown that this does sometimes occur with hybrids, yet, I grant, much less frequently with hybrids 113 than with mongrels. Looking to the cases which I have collected of cross-bred animals closely resembling one parent, the resemblances seem chiefly confined to characters almost monstrous in their nature, and which have suddenly appeared—such as albinism, melanism, deficiency of tail or horns, or additional fingers and toes—and do not relate to characters which have been slowly acquired by selection. Consequently, sudden reversions to the perfect character of either parent would be more likely to occur with mongrels, which are descended from varieties often suddenly produced and semi-monstrous in character, than with hybrids, which are descended from species slowly and naturally produced. On the whole, I entirely agree with Dr. Prosper Lucas, who, after arranging an enormous body of facts with respect to animals, comes to the conclusion that the laws of resemblance of the child to its parents are the same, whether the two parents differ much or little from each other— namely, in the union of individuals of the same variety, or of different varieties, or of distinct species. Laying aside the question of fertility and sterility, in. all other respects there seems to be a general and close similarity in the offspring of crossed species and of crossed varieties. If we look at species as having been specially created, and at varieties as having been ^produced by secondary laws, this similarity would be an astonishing fact. But it harmonises perfectly with the view that there is no essential distinction between species and varieties. Summary of ‘ Chapter—Yfrsk crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids, are very generally, but not universally, sterile. The sterility is of all degrees, and is often so slight that the two most careful experi­ mentalists who have ever lived have come to diametrically opposite conclusions in ranking forms by this test. The sterility is innately variable in individuals of the same species, and is eminently susceptible of favourable and unfavourable conditions. The degree of sterility does not strictly follow systematic affinity, but is governed by several curious and complex laws. It is generally different, and sometimes widely different, in reciprocal crosses between the same two species. It is not always equal in degree in a first cross and in the hybrid produced from this cross. I �114 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES In the same manner as in grafting trees the capacity of one species or variety to take on another is incidental on generally unknown differences in their vegetative systems, so, in crossing, the greater or less facility of one species to unite with another is incidental on unknown differences in their reproductive systems. There is no more reason to think that species have been specially endowed with various de­ grees of sterility to prevent them crossing and blending in nature than to think that trees have been specially endowed with various and somewhat analogous degrees of difficulty in being grafted together in order to prevent them becoming inarched in our forests. The sterility of first crosses between pure species, which have their reproductive organs perfect, seems to depend on several circumstances—in some cases, largely on the early death of the embryo. The sterility of hybrids, which have their reproductive systems imperfect, and which have had this system and their whole organisation disturbed by being compounded of two distinct species, seems closely allied to that sterility which so frequently affects pure species, when their natural conditions of life have been disturbed. This view is supported by a parallelism of another kind —namely, that the crossing of forms only slightly different is favourable to the vigour and fertility of their offspring; and that slight changes in the conditions of life are apparently favourable to the vigour and fertility of all organic beings. It is not surprising that the degree of difficulty in I uniting two species, and the degree of sterility of their hybrid-offspring should generally correspond, though due to dis­ tinct causes, for both depend on the amount of difference of some kind between the species which are crossed. Nor is it surprising that the facility of effecting a first cross, the fertility of the hybrids pro­ duced from it, and the capacity of being grafted together—though this latter capa­ city evidently depends on widely different circumstances—should all run, to a certain extent, parallel with the systematic affinity of the forms which are subjected to experi­ ment ; for systematic affinity attempts to express all kinds of resemblance between all species. First crosses between forms known to be varieties, or sufficiently alike to be con­ ■ sidered as varieties, and their mongrel offspring, are very generally, but not quite universally, fertile. Nor is this nearly general and perfect fertility surprising when we remember how liable we are to argue in a circle with respect to varieties in a state of nature, and when we remember that the greater number of varieties have been produced under domestication by the selection of mere external differences, and not of differences in the reproductive system. In all other respects, excluding | fertility, there is a close general resemblance between hybrids and mongrels. Finally, j then, the facts briefly given in this chapter j do not seem to me opposed to, but even I rather to support, the view that there is no j fundamental distinction between species and varieties. Chapter IX. ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD On the absence of intermediate varieties at the present day—On the nature of extinct intermediate varieties ; on their number—On the vast lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of deposition and of denudation—On the poorness of our palaeontological collections— On the intermittence of geological formations —On the absence of intermediate varieties in any one formation—On the sudden appear­ ance of groups of species—On their sudden appearance in the lowest known fossiliferous strata. In the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One—namely, the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links—is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances appa­ rently most favourable for their presence— namely, on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly, like heat or moisture. I endeavoured also to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, how­ ever, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermina­ tion has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on the earth be truly enormous. Why, then, is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links ? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finelygraduated organic chain ; and this, per­ haps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geo­ logical record. In the first place, it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid pictur­ ing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view : we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor ; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descen­ dants. To give a simple illustration : the fantail and pouter pigeons have both des­ cended from the rock-pigeon ; if we pos­ 115 sessed all the intermediate varieties which have ever existed, we should have an extremely close series between both and the rock-pigeon ; but we should have no varieties directly intermediate between the fantail and pouter-—-none, for instance, combining a tail somewhat expanded, with a crop somewhat enlarged, the characteristic features of these two breeds. These two breeds, moreover, have become so much modified that, if we had no historical or indirect evidence regarding their origin, it would not have been possible to have deter­ mined, from a mere comparison of their structure with that of the rock-pigeon, whether they had descended from this species or from some other allied species, such as C. oenas. So with natural species, if we look to forms very distinct—for instance, to the horse and tapir—we have no reason to suppose that links ever existed directly intermediate between them, but between each and an unknown common parent. The common parent will have had in its whole organisation much general resem­ blance to the tapir and to the horse, but in some points of structure may have differed considerably from both, even per­ haps more than they differ from each other. Hence, in all such cases we should be unable to recognise the parent-form of any two or more species, even if we closely compared the structure of the parent with that of its modified descendants, unless at the same time we had a nearly perfect chain of the intermediate links. It is just possible, by my theory, that'one of two living forms might have descended from the other—for instance, a horse from a tapir; and in this case direct intermediate links will have existed between them. But such a case would imply that one form had remained for a very long period unaltered, while its descendants had undergone a vast amount of change ; and the principle of competition between organism and organism, between child and parent, will render this a very rare event, for in all cases the new and improved forms of life tend to supplant the old and unimproved forms. By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differ­ ences not greater than we see between the varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now gene­ rally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient species; and �' 116 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES so on backwards, always converging to the P miles any line of rocky cliff which is under­ common ancestor of each great class. So going degradation, we find that it is-only that the number of intermediate and transi­ here and there, along a short length, or tional links, between all living and extinct round a promontory, that the cliffs are at species, must have been inconceivably the present time suffering. The appear­ great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, ance of the surface and the vegetation such have lived upon this earth. show that elsewhere years have elapsed since the waters washed their base. On the lapse of Time.—Independently of He who most closely studies the action our not finding fossil remains of such of the sea on our shores will, I believe, be infinitely numerous connecting-links, it may most deeply impressed with the slowness be objected that time will not have sufficed with which rocky coasts are worn away. for so great an amount of organic change, The observations on this head by Hugh all changes having been effected very Miller, and by that excellent observer, Mr. slowly through natural selection. It is Smith, of Jordan Hill, are most impressive. hardly possible for me even to recall to the With the mind thus impressed, let anyone reader, who may not be a practical geo­ examine beds of conglomerate many thou­ logist, the facts leading the mind freely to sand feet in thickness, which, though pro­ comprehend the lapse of time. He who bably formed at a quicker rate than many can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work other deposits, yet, from being formed of on the Principles of Geology, which the worn and rounded pebbles, each of which future historian will recognise as having bears the stamp of time, are good to show produced a revolution in natural science, how slowly the mass has been accumulated. yet does not admit how incomprehensively i In the Cordillera I estimated one pile of vast have been the past periods of time, conglomerate at ten thousand feet in thick­ ness. Let the observer remember Lyell’s may at once close this volume. Not that it suffices to study the Principles of Geology, profound remark, that the thickness and or to read special treatises by different extent of sedimentary formations are the observers on separate formations, and to result and measure of the degradation mark how each author attempts to give an which the earth’s crust has elsewhere inadequate idea of the duration of each suffered. And what an amount of degrada­ tion is implied by the sedimentary deposits formation, or even each stratum. A man of many countries ! Professor Ramsay has must for years examine for himself great given me the maximum thickness, in most piles of superimposed strata, and watch the cases from actual measurement, in a few sea at work grinding down old rocks and cases from estimate, of each formation in making fresh sediment, before he can hope different part of Great Britain ; and this is> to comprehend anything of the lapse of time, the monuments of which we see the result :— Feet. around us. Palaeozoic strata (not including It is good to wander along lines of sea­ igneous beds)... ............... 57>J54 coast, when formed of moderately hard Secondary strata ............... rocks, and mark the process of degradation. Tertiary strata ... ... ... 2,240 The tides in most cases reach the cliffs —making altogether 72,584 feet; that is, only for a short time twice a day, and the very nearly thirteen and three-quarters waves eat into them only when they are British miles. Some of the formations, charged with sand or pebbles ; for there is which are represented in England by thin good evidence that pure water can effect beds, are thousands of feet in thickness on little or nothing in wearing away rock. At the continent. Moreover, between each last the base of the cliff is undermined, successive formation we have, in the opinion huge fragments fall down, and these, of most geologists, enormously-long blank remaining fixed, have to be worn away, periods. So that the lofty pile of sedi­ atom by atom, until reduced in size they mentary rocks in Britain gives but an can be roiled about by the waves, and inadequate idea of the time which has then are more quickly ground into pebbles, elapsed during their' accumulation; yet sand, or mud. But how often do we see what time this must have consumed! along the bases of retreating cliffs rounded Good observers have estimated that sedi­ boulders, all thickly clothed by marine ment is deposited by the great Mississippi productions, showing how little they are river at the rate of only 600 feet in a abraded and how seldom they are rolled hundred thousand years. This estimate about! Moreover, if we follow for a few �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD 117 ments meet and close, one can safely has no pretension to strict exactness ; yet, picture to oneself the great dome of rocks considering over what wide spaces very which must have covered up the Weald fine sediment is transported by the currents within so limited a period as since the of the sea, the process of accumulation in latter part of the Chalk formation. The any one area must be extremely slow. distance from the northern to the southern But the amount of denudation which the Downs is about 22 miles, and the thickness strata have in many places suffered, inde­ of the several formations is on an average pendently of the rate of accumulation of about 1,100 feet, as I am informed by Pro­ the degraded matter, probably offers the fessor Ramsay. But if, as some geologists best evidence of the lapse of time. I re­ member having been much struck with suppose, a range of older rocks underlies the Weald, on the flanks of which the the evidence of denudation, when viewing volcanic islands, which have been worn by overlying sedimentary deposits might have accumulated in thinner masses than else­ the waves and pared all round into perpen­ dicular cliffs of one or two thousand feet in where, the above estimate would be erro­ neous ; but this source of doubt probably height; for the gentle slope of the larva­ streams, due to their former liquid state, would not greatly affect the estimate as showed at a glance how far the hard, applied to the western extremity of the rocky beds had once extended into the district. If, then, we knew the rate at which the sea commonly wears away a open ocean. The same story is still more plainly told by faults—those great cracks line of cliff of any given height, we could along which the strata have been upheaved measure the time requisite to have denuded on one side, or thrown down on the other, the Weald. This, of course, cannot be to the height or depth of thousands of done ; but we may, in order to form some feet; for, since the crust cracked, the sur­ crude notion on the subject, assume that face of the land has been so completely the sea would eat into cliffs 500 feet in planed down by the action of the sea that height at the rate of one inch in a century. no trace of these vast dislocations is ex­ This will at first appear much too small an ternally visible. allowance ; but it is the same as if we were The Craven fault, for instance, extends to assume a cliff one yard in height to be for upwards of 30 miles, and along this eaten back along a whole line of coast at line the vertical displacement of the strata the rate of one yard in nearly every twentyhas varied from 600 to 3,000 feet. Pro­ two years. I doubt whether any rock, even fessor Ramsay has published an account as soft as chalk, would yield at this rate of a downthrow in Anglesea of 2,300 feet; excepting on the most exposed coasts ; and he informs me that he fully believes though no doubt the degradation of a lofty • there is one in Merionethshire of 12,000 cliff would be more rapid from the breakage feet; yet in these cases there is nothing on of the falling fragments. On the other the surface to show such prodigious move­ hand, I do not believe that any line of* ments, the pile of rocks on the one or coast, ten or twenty miles in length, ever other side having been smoothly swept • suffers degradation at the same time along away. The consideration of these facts its whole indented length ; and we must impresses my mind almost in the same remember that almost all strata contain manner as does the vain endeavour to harder layers or nodules, which from long grapple with the idea of eternity. resisting attrition form a breakwater at the I am tempted to give one other case, the base. We may at least confidently believe well-known one of the denudation of the that no rocky coast 500 feet in height Weald. Though it must be admitted that commonly yields at the rate of a foot per the denudation of the Weald has been a century; for this would be the same in mere trifle, in comparison with that which amount as a cliff one yard in height retreat­ has removed masses of our palaeozoic ing twelve yards in twenty-two years ; and strata, in parts ten thousand feet in thick­ no one, I think, who has carefully observed ness, as shown in Professor Ramsay’s the shape of old fallen fragments at the masterly memoir on this subject; yet it base of cliffs will admit any near approach is an admirable lesson to stand on the to such rapid wearing away. Hence, intermediate hilly country and look on the under ordinary circumstances, I should one hand at the North Downs, and on the infer that for a cliff 500 feet in height a other hand at the South Downs ; for, denudation of one inch per century for the remembering that at no great distance to whole length would be a sufficient allow­ the west the northern and southern escarp­ ance. At this rate, on the above data, the �ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES denudation of the Weald must have required 306,662,400 years ; or say three hundred million years. But perhaps it would be safer to allow two or three inches per century, and this would reduce the number of years to one hundred and fifty or one hundred million years. The action of fresh water on the gently inclined Wealden district, when upraised, could hardly have been great, but it would somewhat reduce the above estimate. On the other hand, during oscillations of level, which we know this area has undergone, the surface may have existed for millions of years as land, and thus have escaped the action of the sea : when deeply submerged for perhaps equally long periods, it would, likewise, have escaped the action of the coast-waves. So that it is not improbable that a longer period than 300 million years has elapsed since the latter part of the Secondary period. I have made these few remarks because it is highly important for us to gain some notion, however imperfect, of the lapse of years. During each of these years, over the whole world, the land and the water has been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years ! Now turn to our richest geological museums, and what a paltry display we behold 1 On the poorness of our Palceontological collections.—That our palaeontological col­ lections are very imperfect is admitted by every one. The remark of that admirable palaeontologist, the late Edward Forbes, should not be forgotten—namely, that numbers of our fossil species are known and named from single and often broken specimens, or from a few specimens col­ lected on some one spot. Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care, as the important discoveries made every year in Europe prove. No organism wholly soft can be preserved. Shells and bones will decay and disappear when left on the bottom of the sea, where sediment is not accumulating. I believe we are continually taking a most erroneous view when we tacitly admit to ourselves that sediment is being deposited over nearly the whole bed of the sea at a rate sufficiently quick to embed and preserve fossil remains. Throughout an enormously large proportion of the ocean the bright blue tint of the water bespeaks its purity. The many cases on record of a formation conformably covered, after an enormous interval of time, by another and later forma­ tion, without the underlying bed having suffered in the interval any wear and tear, seem explicable only on the view of the bottom of the sea not rarely lying for ages in an unaltered condition. The remains which do become embedded, if in sand or gravel, will, when the beds are upraised, generally be dissolved by the percolation of rain-water. I suspect that but few of the very many animals which live on the beach between high and low watermark are pre­ served. For instance, the several species of the Chthamalinae (a sub-family of sessile cirripedes) coat the rocks all over the world in infinite numbers : they are all strictly littoral, with the exception of a single Mediterranean species, which inhabits deep water and has been found fossil in Sicily, whereas not one other species has hitherto been found in any tertiary formation ; yet it is now known that the genus Chthamalus existed during the chalk period. The molluscan genus Chiton offers a partially ana­ logous case. With respect to the terrestrial produc­ tions which lived during the Secondary and Palaeozoic periods, it is superfluous to state that our evidence from fossil remains is fragmentary in an extreme degree. For instance, not a land shell is known be­ longing to either of these vast periods, with the exception of one species dis­ covered by Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Dawson in the carboniferous strata of North America, of which shell several specimens have now * been collected. In regard to mammiferous remains, a single glance at the historical table published in the Supplement to Lyell’s Manual will bring home the truth, how accidental and rare is their preser­ vation, far better than pages of detail. Nor is their rarity surprising when we remember how large a proportion of the bones of tertiary mammals have been dis­ covered either in caves or in lacustrine deposits; and that not a cave or true lacustrine bed is known belonging to the age of our secondary or palaeozoic formations. But the imperfection in the geological record mainly results from another and more important cause than any of the foregoing—-namely, from the several forma­ tions being separated from each other by wide intervals of time. When we see the formations tabulated in written works, or when we follow them in nature, it is diffi­ • cult to avoid believing that they are closely �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD consecutive. But we know, for instance, from Sir R. Murchison’s great work on Russia, what wide gaps there are in that country between the superimposed forma­ tions ; so it is in North America, and in many other parts of the world. The most skilful geologist, if his attention had been exclusively confined to these large terri­ tories, would never have suspected that during the periods which were blank and barren in his own country great piles of sediment, charged with new and peculiar forms of life, had elsewhere been accumu­ lated. And if in each separate territory hardly any idea can be formed of the length of time which has elapsed between the consecutive formations, we may infer that this could nowhere be ascertained. The frequent and great changes in the mineralogical composition of consecutive formations, generally implying great changes in the geography of the sur­ rounding lands, whence the sediment has been derived, accords with the belief of vast intervals of time having elapsed between each formation. But we can, I think, see why the geo­ logical formations of each region are almost invariably intermittent — that is, have not followed each other in close sequence. Scarcely any fact struck me more, when’ examining many hundred miles of the South American coasts, which have been upraised several hundred feet within the recent period, than the absence of any recent deposits sufficiently extensive to last for even a short geological period. « Along the whole west coast, which is inhabited by a peculiar marine fauna, tertiary beds are so poorly developed that no record of several successive and peculiar marine faunas will probably be preserved to a distant age. A little reflec­ tion will explain why along the rising coast of the western side of South America no extensive formations with recent or tertiary remains can anywhere be found, though the supply of sediment must for ages have been great, from the enormous degradation of the coast-rocks and from muddy streams entering the sea. The explanation, no doubt, is that the littoral and sub-littoral deposits are continually worn away as soon as they are brought up by the slow and gradual rising of the land within the grinding action of the coast-waves. We may, I think, safely conclude that sediment must be accumulated in extremely thick, solid, or extensive masses, in order to withstand the incessant action of the 119 waves when first upraised and during subsequent oscillations of level. Such thick and extensive accumulations of sedi­ ment may be formed in two ways—either, in profound depths of the sea, in which , case, judging from the researches of E. Forbes, we may conclude that the bottom will be inhabited by extremely few animals, and the mass, when upraised, will give a most imperfect record of the forms of life which then existed ; or sediment may be accumulated to any thickness and extent over a shallow bottom, if it continue slowly to subside. In this latter case, as long as the rate of subsidence and supply of sedi­ ment nearly balance each other, the sea will remain shallow and favourable for life, and thus a fossiliferous formation thick enough, when upraised, to resist any amount of degradation may be formed. I am convinced that all our ancient formations which are rich in fossils have thus been formed during subsidence: Since publishing my views on this subject in 1845, I have watched the progress of Geology, and have been surprised to note how author after author, in treating of this or that great formation, has come to the conclusion that it was accumulated during subsidence. I may add that the only ancient tertiary formation on the west coast of South America which has been bulky enough to resist such degradation as it has as yet suf­ fered, but which will hardly last to a distant geological age, was certainly deposited during a downward oscillation of level, and thus gained considerable thickness. All geological facts tell us plainly that each area has undergone numerous slow oscillations of level, and apparently these oscillations have affected wide spaces. Consequently, formations rich in fossils, and sufficiently thick and extensive to resist subsequent degradation, may have been formed over wide spaces during periods of subsidence, but only where the supply of sediment was sufficient to keep the sea shallow and to embed and preserve the remains before they had time to decay. On the other hand, as long as the bed of the sea remained stationary, thick deposits could not have been accumulated in the shallow parts, which are the most favour­ able to life. Still less could this have happened during the alternate periods of elevation ; or, to speak more accurately, the beds which were then accumulated will have been destroyed by being upraised and brought within the limits of the coast­ action. �120 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Thus the geological record will almost necessarily be rendered intermittent. I feel much confidence in the truth of these views, for they are in strict accordance with the general principles inculcated by Sir C. Lyell; and E. Forbes subsequently but inde­ pendently arrived at a similar conclusion. One remark is here worth a passing notice. During periods of elevation the area of the land and of the adjoining shoal parts of the sea will be increased, and new stations will often be formed—all circum­ stances most, favourable, as previously explained, for the formation of new varieties and species; but during such periods there will generally be a blank in the geological record. On the other hand, during subsi­ dence the inhabited area and number of inhabitants will decrease (excepting the productions on the shores of a continent when first broken up into an archipelago), and consequently during subsidence, though there will be much extinction, fewer new varieties or species will be formed ; and it is during these very periods of sub­ sidence that our great deposits rich in fossils have been accumulated. Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms. From the foregoing considerations it cannot be doubted that the geological record, viewed as a whole, is extremely im­ perfect ; but if we confine our attention to any one formation, it becomes more difficult to understand why we do not therein find closely graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commence­ ment and at its close. Some cases are on record of the same species presenting distinct varieties in the upper and lower parts of the same formation ; but, as they are rare, they may be here passed over. Although each formation has indisputably required a vast number of years for its deposition, I can see several reasons why each should not include a graduated series of links between the species which then lived; but I can by no means pretend to assign due proportional weight to the following considerations. Although each formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each perhaps is short compared with the period requisite to change one species into another. I am aware that two palaeontologists, whose opinions are worthy of much deference— namely, Bronn and Woodward, have con­ cluded that the average duration of each formation is twice or thrice as long as the average duration of specific forms. But insuperable difficulties, as it seems to me, prevent us coming to any just conclusion on this head. When we see a species first appearing in the middle of any formation, it would be rash in the extreme to infer that it had not elsewhere previously existed. So again, when we find a species disap­ pearing before the uppermost layers have been deposited, it would be equally rash to suppose that it then became wholly extinct. We forget how small the area of Europe is compared with the rest of the world ; nor have the several stages of the same forma­ tion throughout Europe been correlated with perfect accuracy. With marine animals of all kinds, we may safely infer a large amount of migra­ tion during climatal and other changes ; and when we see a species first ap­ pearing in any formation, the probability is that it only then first immigrated into that area. It is well known, for instance, that several species appeared somewhat earlier in the palaeozoic beds of North America than in those of Europe; time having apparently been required for their migra­ tion from the American to the European seas. In examining the latest'deposits of various quarters of the world, it has every­ where been noted that some few still existing species are common in the deposit, but have become extinct in the immediately Surrounding sea; or, conversely, that some are now abundant in the neighbouring sea, but are rare or absent in this particular deposit. It is an excellent lesson to reflect on the ascertained amount of migration of the inhabitants of Europe during the Glacial period, which forms only a part of one whole geological period ; and likewise to reflect on the great changes of level, on the inordinately great change of climate, on the prodigious lapse of time, all included within this same glacial period. Yet it may be doubted whether in any quarter of the world sedimentary deposits, including' fossil remains, have gone on accumulating within the same area during the whole of this period. It is not, for instance, pro­ bable that sediment was deposited during the whole of the glacial period near the mouth of the Mississippi, within that limit of depth at which marine animals can flourish ; for we know what vast geo­ graphical changes occurred in other parts of America during this space of time. When such beds as were deposited in shallow water near the mouth of the Mississippi during some part of the glacial �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD period shall have been upraised, organic remains will probably first appear and disappear at different levels, owing to the migration of species and to geographical changes. And in the distant future a geologist examining these beds might be tempted to conclude that the average duration of life of the embedded fossils had been less than that of the glacial period, instead of having been really far greater—that is, extending from before the glacial epoch to the present day. In order to get a perfect gradation between two forms in the upper and lower parts of the same formation, the deposit must have gone on accumulating for a very long period, in order to have given sufficient time for the slow process of variation; hence the deposit will generally have to be a very thick one; and the species undergoing modification will have had to live on the same area throughout this whole time. But we have seen that a thick fossiliferous formation can only be accumulated during a period of subsidence; and to keep the depth approximately the same, which is necessary in order to enable the same species to live on the same space, the supply of sediment must nearly have counterbalanced the amount of subsidence. But this same movement of subsidence will often tend to sink the area whence the sediment is derived, and thus diminish the supply while the downward movement con­ tinues. In fact, this nearly exact balancing between the supply of sediment and the amount of subsidence is probably a rare contingency ; for it has been observed by more than one palaeontologist that very thick deposits are usually barren of organic remains, except near their upper or lower limits. It would seem that each separate forma­ tion, like the whole pile of formations in any country, has generally been intermittent in its accumulation. When we see, as is so often the case, a formation composed of beds of different mineralogical composition, we may reasonably suspect that the process of deposition has been much interrupted, as a change in the currents of the sea and a supply of sediment of a different nature will generally have been due to geographical changes requiring much time. Nor will the closest inspection of a formation give any idea of the time which its deposition has consumed. Many instances could be given of beds only a few feet in thickness, representing formations, elsewhere thou­ sands of feet in thickness, and which must 121 have required an enormous period for their accumulation ; yet no one ignorant of this fact would have suspected the vast lapse of time represented by the thinner formation. Many cases could be given of the lower beds of a formation having been upraised, denuded, submerged, and then re-covered by the upper beds of the same formation —facts showing what wide, yet easily over­ looked, intervals have occurred in its accu­ mulation. In other cases we have the plainest evidence in great fossilised trees, still standing upright as they grew, of many long intervals of time and changes of level during the process of deposition, which would never even have been suspected had not the trees chanced to have been preserved : thus Messrs. Lyell and Dawson found carboniferous beds 1,400 feet thick in Nova Scotia, with ancientroot-b earing strata, one above the other, at no less than sixty­ eight different levels. Hence, when the same species occur at the bottom, middle, and top of a formation, the probability is that they have not lived on the same spot during the whole period of deposition, but have disappeared and reappeared, perhaps many times, during the same geological period. So that, if such species were to undergo a considerable amount of modifi­ cation during any one geological period, a section would not probably include all the fine intermediate gradations which must, on my theory, have existed between them, but abrupt, though perhaps very slight, changes of form. It is all-important to remember that naturalists have no golden rule by which *to distinguish species and varieties ; they grant some little variability to each species, but when they meet with a somewhat greater amount of difference between any two forms they rank both as species, unless they are enabled to connect them together by close intermediate gradations. And this, from the reasons just assigned, we can seldom hope to effect in any one geological section. Supposing B and C to be two species, and a third, A, to be found in an underlying bed ; even if A were strictly intermediate between B and C, it would simply be ranked as a third and distinct species, unless at the same time it could be most closely connected with either one or both forms by intermediate varieties. Nor should it be forgotten, as before explained, that A might be the actual progenitor of B and C, and yet might not at all necessarily be strictly intermediate between them in all points of structure. �122 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES So that we might obtain the parent-species and its several modified descendants from the lower and upper beds of a formation, and, unless we obtained numerous transi­ tional gradations, we should not recognise their relationship, and should consequently be compelled to rank them all as distinct species. It is notorious on what excessively slight differences many palaeontologists have founded their species; and they do this the more readily if the specimens come from different sub-stages of the same formation. Some experienced conchologists are now sinking many of the very fine species of D’Orbigny and others into the rank ot varieties ; and on this view we do find the kind of evidence of change which on my theory we ought to find. Moreover, if we look to rather wider intervals—namely, to distinct but consecutive stages of the same great formation, we find that the embedded fossils, though almost universally ranked as specifically different, yet are far more closely allied to each other than are the species found in more widely separated formations; but to this subject I shall have to return in the following chapter. One other consideration is worth notice : with animals and plants that can propagate rapidly and are not highly locomotive, there is reason to suspect, as we have formerly seen, that their varieties are generally at first local; and that such local varieties do not spread widely and supplant their parent­ forms until they have been modified and perfected in some considerable degree. According to this view, the chance of dis­ covering in a formation in any one country all the early stages of transition between any two forms is small, for the successive changes are supposed to have been local or confined to some one spot. Most marine animals have a wide range; and we have seen that with plants it is those which have the widest range that oftenest present varieties; so that with shells and other marine animals it is probably those which have had the widest range, far exceeding the limits of the known geological forma­ tions of Europe, which have oftenest given rise, first to local varieties, and ultimately to new species ; and this again would greatly lessen the chance of our being able to trace the stages of transition in any one geological formation. It should not be forgotten that at the present day, with perfect specimens for examination, two forms can seldom be con­ nected by intermediate varieties and thus proved to be the same species, until many specimens have been collected from many places; and in the case of fossil species this could rarely be effected by palaeontologists. We shall, perhaps, best perceive the impro­ bability of our being enabled to connect species by numerous, fine, intermediate, fossil links, by asking ourselves whether, for instance, geologists at some future period will be able to prove that our different breeds of cattle, sheep, horses, and dogs have descended from a single stock or from several aboriginal stocks; or, again, whether certain sea-shells inhabiting the shores of North America, which are ranked by some conchologists as distinct species from their European representatives, and by other conchologists as only varieties, are really varieties, or are, as it is called, specifically distinct. This could be effected only by the future geologist discovering in a fossil state numerous intermediate gradations; and such success seems to me improbable in the highest degree. Geological research, though it has added numerous species to existing and extinct genera, and has made the intervals between some few groups less wide than they other­ wise would have been, yet has done scarcely anything in breaking down the distinc­ tion between species, by connecting them together by numerous, fine, intermediate varieties; and this not having been effected is probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which may be urged against my views. Hence it will be worth while to sum up the foregoing remarks, under an imaginary illustration. The Malay Archipelago is of about the size of Europe from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and from Britain to Russia; and therefore equals all the geological formations which have been examined with any accuracy, excepting those of the United States of America. I fully agree with Mr. Godwin-Austen, that the present condition of the Malay Archipelago, with its numerous large islands separated by wide and shallow seas, probably represents the former state of Europe, whilst most of our formations were accumulating. The Malay Archi­ pelago is one of the richest regions of the whole world in organic beings ; yet, if all the species were to be collected which have ever lived there, how imperfectly would they represent the natural history of the world ! But we have every reason to believe that the terrestrial productions of the archipelago would be preserved in an excessively im­ perfect manner in the formations which we �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD suppose to be there accumulating. I sus­ pect that not many of the strictly littoral animals, or of those which lived on naked submarine rocks, would be embedded; and those embedded in gravel or sand would not endure to a distant epoch. Wherever sediment did not accumulate on the bed of the sea, or where it did not accumulate.at a sufficient rate to protect organic bodies from decay, no remains could be preserved. I believe that fossiliferous formations could be formed in the archipelago, of thickness sufficient to last to an age as distant in futurity as the secondary forma­ tions lie in the past, only during periods of subsidence. These periods of subsidence would be separated from each other by enormous intervals, during which the area would be either stationary or rising; while rising, each fossiliferous formation would be destroyed, almost as soon as accumulated, by the incessant coast-action, as we now see on the shores of South America. During the periods of subsidence there would pro­ bably be much extinction of life ; during the periods of elevation there would be much variation; but the geological record would then be at least perfect. It may be doubted whether the duration of any one great period of subsidence over the whole or part of the archipelago, together with a contemporaneous accu­ mulation of sediment, would exceed the average duration of the same specific forms; and these contingencies are indispensable for the preservation of all the transitional gradations between any two or more species. If such gradations were not fully preserved, transitional varieties would merely.appear as so many distinct species. It is,, also, probable that each great period of subsi­ dence would be interrupted, by oscillations of level, and that slight climatal changes would intervene during such lengthy periods; and in these cases the inhabitants of the archipelago would have to migrate, and no closely consecutive record of their modi­ fications could be preserved in any one formation. Very many of the marine inhabitants of the archipelago now range thousands of miles beyond its confines ; and analogy leads me to believe that it would be chiefly these far-ranging species which would oftenest produce new varieties ; and the varieties would at first generally be local or confined to one place, but if possessed of any decided advantage, or when further modified and improved, they would slowly spread and supplant their parent-forms. 123 When such varieties returned to their ancient homes, as they would differ from their former state, in a nearly uniform, though perhaps extremely slight degree, they would, according to the principles followed by many palaeontologists, be ranked as new and distinct species. If, then, there be some degree of truth in these remarks, we have no right to expect to find in our geological formation an infinite number of those fine transitional forms which, on my theory, assuredly have connected all the past and present species of the same group into one long and branch­ ing chain of life. We ought only to look for a few links, some more closely, some more distantly related to each other ; and these links, let them be ever so close, if found in different stages of the same forma­ tion, would, by most palaeontologists, be ranked as distinct species. But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of tire mutations of life, the best preserved geological section pre­ sented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each forma­ tion pressed so hardly on my theory. On the sudden appearance of whole groups of Allied Species.—The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and by none more forcibly than by Professor Sedgwick —as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection. For the development of a group of forms, all of which have descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process ; and the progenitors must have lived long ages before their modified descendants. But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. We con­ tinually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined ; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed and have slowly multiplied before they invaded the �124 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ancient archipelagoes of Europe and of the United States. We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations—longer perhaps in most cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multi­ plication of species from some one or some few parent-forms; and in the succeeding formation such species will appear as if suddenly created. I may here recall a remark formerly made—namely, that it might require a long succession of ages to adapt an organ­ ism to some new and peculiar line of life ; for instance, to fly through the air; but that when this had been effected, and a few species had thus acquired a great advantage over other organisms, a com­ paratively short time would be necessary to produce many divergent forms, which would be able to spread rapidly and widely throughout the world. I will now give a few examples to illus­ trate these remarks, and to show how liable we are to error in supposing that whole groups of species have suddenly been pro­ duced. I may recall the well-known fact that in geological treatises, published not many years ago, the great class of mammals was always spoken of as having abruptly come in at the commencement of the tertiary series. And now one of the richest known accumulations of fossil mammals,.for its thickness, belongs to the middle of the secondary series; and one true mammal has been discovered in the new red sandstone at nearly the commencement of this great series. Cuvier used to urge that no monkey occurred in any tertiary stratum ; but now extinct species have been discovered in India, South America, and in Europe even as far back as the eocene stage. Had it not been for the rare accident of the pre­ servation of footsteps in the new red sand­ stone of the United States, who would have ventured to suppose that, besides reptiles, no less than at least thirty kinds of birds, some of gigantic size, existed during that period? Not a fragment of bone has been discovered in these beds. Notwithstanding that the number of joints shown in the fossil impressions correspond with the number in the several toes of living birds’ feet, some authors doubt whether the animals which left the impres­ sions were really birds. Until quite recently these authors might have maintained, and some have maintained, that the whole ciass of birds came suddenly into existence during an early tertiary period ; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen (as may be seen in Lyell’s Manual}, that a bird certainly lived during the deposi­ tion of the upper greensand. I may give another instance, which, from having passed under my own eyes, has much struck me. Ina memoir on Fossil Sessile Cirripedes, I have stated that from the number of existing and extinct tertiary species ; from the extraordinary abundance of the individuals of many species all over the world, from-the Arctic regions to the equator, inhabiting various zones of depths from the upper tidal limits to 50 fathoms ; from the perfect manner in which specimens are preserved in the oldest tertiary beds ; from the ease with which even a fragment of a valve can be recognised; from all these circumstances, I inferred that, had sessile cirripedes existed during the secon­ dary periods, they would certainly have been preserved and discovered; and as not one species had then been discovered in beds of this age, I concluded that this great group had been suddenly developed at the commencement of the tertiary series. This was a sore trouble to me, adding as I thought one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published when a skilful paleontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen of an unmistakable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium. And, as if to make the case as striking as possible, this sessile cirripede was a Chthamalus, a very common, large, and ubiquitous genus, of which not one specimen has as yet been found even in any tertiary stratum. Hence we now positively know that sessile cirripedes existed during the secondary period ; and these cirripedes might have been the progenitors of our many tertiary and existing species. The case most frequently insisted on by palaeontologists, of the apparently sudden appearance of a whole group of species, is that of the teleostean fishes, low down in the Chalk period. This group includes the large majority of existing species. Lately, Professor Pictet has carried their existence one sub-stage further back; and some palaeontologists believe that certain much older fishes, of which the affinities are as yet imperfectly known, are really teleostean. Assuming, however, that the whole of them did appear, as Agassiz believes, at the com­ mencement of the chalk formation, the fact �ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD would certainly be highly remarkable ; but I cannot see that it would be an insuperable difficulty on my theory, unless it could like­ wise be shown that the species of this group appeared suddenly and simulta­ neously throughout the world at this same period. It is almost superfluous to remark that hardly any fossil-fish are known from south of the equator; and by running through Pictet’s Palceontology it will be seen that very few species are known from several formations in Europe. Some few families of fish now have a confined range ; the teleostean fish might formerly have had a similarly confined range, and, after having been largely developed in some one sea, might have spread widely. Nor have we any right to suppose that the seas of the world have always been so freely open from south to north as they arc at present. Even at this day, if the Malay Archipelago were converted into land, the tropical parts of the Indian Ocean would form a large and perfectly enclosed basin, in which any great group of marine animals might be multiplied ; and here they would remain confined until some of the species became adapted to a cooler climate, and were enabled to- double the southern capes of Africa or Australia, and thus reach other and distant seas. From these and similar considerations, but chiefly from our ignorance of the geology of other countries beyond the confines of Europe and the United States, and from the revolution in our palaeonto­ logical ideas on many points, which the discoveries of even the last dozen years have effected, it seems to me to be about as rash in us to dogmatise on the succession of organic beings throughout the world as it would be for a naturalist to land for five minutes on some one barren point in Australia, and then to discuss the number and range of its productions. On the sudden appearance of groups of Allied Species in the lowest known fossili­ ferous strata.—There is another ami allied difficulty which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species. For instance, I cannot doubt that all the Silurian trilobites have descended from some one crustacean, 125 which must have lived long before the Silurian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. Some of the most ancient Silurian animals, as the Nautilus, Lingula, etc., do not differ much from living species ; and it cannot on my theory be supposed that these old species were the progenitors of all the species of the orders to which they belong, for they do not present characters in any degree intermediate between them. If, moreover, they had been the progenitors of. these orders, they would almost cer­ tainly have been long ago supplanted and exterminated by their numerous and im­ proved descendants. Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day ; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question, why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several of the most eminent geologists, with Sir R. Murchison at their head, are convinced that we see in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the dawn of life on this planet. Other highly competent judges, as Lyell and the late E. Forbes, dispute this conclusion. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy. M. Barrande has lately added another and lower stage to the Silurian system, abounding with new and peculiar species. Traces of life have been detected in the Longmynd beds, beneath Barrande’s so-called primordial zone. The presence of phosphatic nodules and bitu­ minous matter in some of the lowest azoic rocks probably indicates the former exist­ ence of life at these periods. But the difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory no doubt were somewhere accu­ mulated before the Silurian epoch, is very great. If these most ancient beds had been wholly worn away by denudation, or oblite­ rated by metamorphic action, we ought to find only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these ought to be very generally in a metamor­ phosed condition. But the descriptions which we now possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America do not support the viejjr, that the older a formation is, the more �126 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES it has always suffered the extremity of continents seem to have been formed by a denudation and metamorphism. preponderance, during many oscillations The case at present must remain inex­ of level, of the force of elevation ; but may plicable; and maybe truly urged as a valid not the areas of preponderant movement argument against the views here enter­ have changed in the lapse of ages ? At a tained. To show that it may hereafter period immeasurably antecedent to the receive some explanation, I will give the Silurian epoch continents may have existed following hypothesis. From the nature of where oceans are now spread out, and the organic remains which do not appear clear and open oceans may have existed to have inhabited profound depths, in the where our continents now stand. Nor several formations of Europe and of the should we be justified in assuming that if, United States, and from the amount of for instance, the bed of the Pacific Ocean sediment, miles in thickness, of which the were now converted into a continent, we formations are composed, we may infer should there find formations older than the that from first to last large islands or tracts Silurian strata, supposing such to have been formerly deposited ; for it might well of land, whence the sediment was derived, occurred in the neighbourhood of the exist­ happen that strata which had subsided ing continents of Europe and North some miles nearer to the centre of the America. But we do not know what was earth, and which had been pressed on by the state of things in the intervals between an enormous weight of superincumbent the successive formations; whether Europe water, might have undergone far more and the United States during these intervals metamorphic action than strata which have always remained nearer to the sur­ existed as dry land, or as a submarine surface near land, on which sediment was face. The immense areas in some parts of not deposited, or as the bed of an open and the world, for instance in South America, of bare metamorphic rocks, which must unfathomable sea. Looking to the existing oceans, which have been heated under great pressure, are thrice as extensive as the land, we see have always seemed to me to require some special explanation ; and we may perhaps them studded with many islands ; but not believe that we see in these large areas the one oceanic island is as yet known to afford many formations long anterior to the Silu­ even a remnant of any palaeozoic or secon­ rian epoch in a completely metamorphosed dary formation. Hence we may perhaps condition. infer that during the palaeozoic and secon­ dary periods neither continents nor conti­ The several difficulties here discussed—• nental islands existed where our oceans now namely, our not finding in the successive extend ; for had they existed there, palaeo­ formations infinitely numerous transitional zoic and secondary formations would in all links between the many species which now probability have been accumulated from exist or have existed ; the sudden manner sediment derived from their wear and tear, in which whole groups of species appear in and would have been at least partially our European formations; the almost entire upheaved by the oscillations of level, absence, as at present known, of fossiliwhich we may fairly conclude must have ferous formations beneath the Silurian intervened during these enormously long strata, are all undoubtedly of the gravest periods. If, then, we may infer anything nature. We see this in the plainest from these facts, we may infer that where manner by the fact that all the most our oceans now extend oceans have ex­ eminent palaeontologists—namely, Cuvier, tended from the remotest period of which Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, we have any record ; and, on the other etc., and all our greatest geologists, as hand, that where continents now exist Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have large tracts of land have existed, subjected unanimously, often vehemently, maintained no doubt to great oscillations of level, the immutability of species. But I have since the earliest Silurian period. The reason to believe that one great authority, coloured map appended to my volume on Sir Charles Lyell, from further reflection Coral Reefs led me to conclude that the entertains grave doubts on this subject. great oceans are still mainly areas of sub­ I feel how rash it is to differ from these sidence, the great archipelagoes still areas authorities, to whom, with others, we owe of oscillations of level, and the continents all our knowledge. Those who think the areas of elevation. But have we any right natural geological record in any degree to assume that things have thus remained perfect, and who do not attach much from the beginning of this world ? Qur �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS weight to the facts and arguments of other kinds given in this volume, will undoubt­ edly at once reject my theory. For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume only here and there a short chapter has been preserved ; and of each ' 127 page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing lan­ guage in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptlychanged forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated, forma­ tions. On this view, the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished, or even disappear. Chapter X. ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS On the slow and successive appearance of new species—On their different rates of change—Species once lost do not reappear—Groups of species follow the same general rules in their appearance and disappearance as do single species—On Extinction—On simultaneous changes in the forms of life throughout the world—On the affinities of extinct species to each other and to living species—On the state of development of ancient forms—On the succession of the same types within the same areas—Summary of preceding and present chapters. Let us now see whether the several facts and rules relating to the geological succes­ sion of organic beings better accord with the common view of the immutability of species, or with that of their slow and gradual modification, through descent and natural selection. New species have appeared very slowly, one after another, both on the land and in the waters. Lyell has shown that it is hardly possible to resist the evidence on this head in the case of the several tertiary stages ; and every year tends to fill up the blanks between them, and to make the percentage system of lost and new forms more gradual. In some of the most recent beds, though undoubtedly of high antiquity if measured by years, only one or two species are lost forms, and only one or two are new forms, having here appeared for the first time, either locally, or, as far as we know, on the face of the earth. If we may trust the observations of Philippi in Sicily, the successive changes in the marine inhabitants of that island have been many and most gradual. The secondary forma­ tions are more broken ; but, as Bronn has remarked, neither the appearance nor dis­ appearance of their many now extinct species has been simultaneous in each separate formation. Species of different genera and classes have not changed at the same rate, or in the same degree. In the oldest tertiary beds a few living shells may still be found in the midst of a multitude of extinct forms. Falconer has given a striking instance of a similar fact in an existing crocodile associated with many strange and lost mammals and reptiles in the subHimalayan deposits. The Silurian Lingula differs but little from the living species of this genus; whereas most of the other Silurian Molluscs and all the Crustaceans have changed greatly. The productions of the land seem to change at a quicker rate than those of the sea, of which a striking instance has lately been observed in Switzerland. There is some reason to believe that organisms, considered high in the scale of nature, change more quickly than those that are low, though there are exceptions to this rule. The amount of organic change, as Pictet has remarked, does not strictly correspond with the �128 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES succession of our geological formations ; so that between each two consecutive forma­ tions the forms of life have seldom changed in exactly the same degree. Yet, if we compare any but the most closely-related formations, all the species will be found to have undergone some change. When a species has once disappeared from the face of the earth, we have reason to believe that the same identical form never reap­ pears. The strongest apparent exception to this latter rule is that of the so-called “ colonies ” of M. Barrande, which intrude for a period in the midst of an older forma­ tion, and then allow the pre-existing fauna to re-appear; but Lyell’s explanation— namely, that it is a case of temporary migration from a distinct geographical province—seems to me satisfactory. These several facts accord well with my theory. I believe in no fixed law of development causing all the inhabitants of a country to change abruptly, or simul­ taneously, or to an equal degree. The process of modification must be extremely slow. The variability of each species is quite independent of that of all others. Whether such variability be taken advan­ tage of by natural selection, and whether the variations be accumulated to a greater or lesser amount, thus causing a greater or lesser amount of modification in the varying species, depends on many complex contin­ gencies—on the variability being of a beneficial nature, on the power of inter­ crossing, on the rate of breeding, on the slowly changing physical conditions of the country, and more especially on the nature of the other inhabitants with which the varying species comes into competition. Hence it is by no means surprising that one species should retain the same iden­ tical form much longer than others ; or, if changing, that it should change less. We see. the same fact in geographical distri­ bution ; for instance, in the land-shells and coleopterous insects of Madeira having come to differ considerably from their nearest allies on the continent of Europe, whereas the marine shells and birds have remained unaltered. We can perhaps understand the apparently quicker rate of change in terrestrial and in more highlyorganised productions compared with marine and lower productions, by the more complex relations of the higher beings to their organic and inorganic conditions of life, as explained in a former chapter. When many of the inhabitants of a country have become modified and improved, we can understand, on the principle of competition, and on that of the many all-important relations of organism to organism, that any form which does not become in some degree modified and im­ proved will be liable to be exterminated. Hence we can see why all the species in the same region do at last, if we look to wide enough intervals of time, become modified; for those which do not change will become extinct. In members of the same class the average amount of change, during long and equal periods of time, may, perhaps, be nearly the same; but as the accumula­ tion of long-enduring fossiliferous formations depends on great masses of sediment having been deposited on areas while subsiding, our formations have been almost necessarily accumulated at wide and irregu­ larly intermittent intervals; consequently, the amount of organic change exhibited by the fossils embedded in consecutive forma­ tions is not equal. Each formation, on this view, does not mark a new and complete act of creation, but only an occasional scene, taken almost at hazard, in a slowly chang­ ing drama. We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and inorganic, should recur. For though the offspring of one species might be adapted (and no doubt this has occurred in innumer­ able instances) to fill the exact place of another .species in the economy of nature, and thus supplant it, yet the two forms— the old and the new—would not be identi­ cally the same ; for both would almost certainly inherit different characters from their distinct progenitors. For instance, it is just possible, if our fantail-pigeons were all destroyed, that fanciers, by striving during long ages for the same object, might make a new breed hardly distinguishable from our present fantail ; but if the parent rock-pigeon were also destroyed, and in nature we have every reason to believe that the parent-form will generally be sup­ planted and exterminated by its improved offspring, it is quite incredible that a fan­ tail, identical with the existing breed, could be raised from any other species of pigeon, or even from the other well-established races of the domestic pigeon, for the newlyformed fantail would be almost sure to inherit from its new progenitor some slight characteristic differences. Groups of species—that is, genera and families—follow the same general rules in �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS their appearance and disappearance as do single species, changingmoreor less quickly, and in a greater or lesser degree. A group does not reappear after it has once disap­ peared; or its existence, as long as it lasts, is continuous. I am aware that there are some apparent exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions are surprisingly few—so few that E. Forbes, Pictet, and Woodward (though all strongly opposed to such views as I maintain) admit its truth ; and the rule strictly accords with my theory. For, as all the species of the same group have descended from some one species, it is clear that as long as any species of the group have appeared in the long succession of ages, so long must its members have continuously existed, in order to have generated either new and modified or the same old and un­ modified forms. Species of the genus Lingula, for instance, must have continu­ ously existed by an unbroken succession of generations, from the lowest Silurian stratum to the present day. We have seen in the last chapter that the species of a group sometimes falsely appear to have come in abruptly; and I have attempted to give an explanation of this fact, which, if true, would have been fatal to my views. But such cases are certainly exceptional, the general rule being a gradual increase in number, till the group reaches its maximum, and then, sooner or later, it gradually decreases. If the number of the species of a genus, or the number of the genera of a family, be represented by a vertical line of varying thickness, crossing the successive geological formations in which the species are found, the line will sometimes falsely appear to begin at its lower end, not in a sharp point, but abruptly; it then gradually thickens upwards, some­ times keeping for a space of equal thickness, and ultimately thins out in the upper beds, marking the decrease and final extinction of the species. This gradual increase in number of the species of a group is strictly conformable with my theory, as the species of the same genus, and the genera of the same family, can increase only slowly and progressively; for the process of modifica­ tion and the production of a number of allied forms must be slow and gradual—• one species giving rise first to two or three varieties, these being slowly converted into species, which, in their turn, produce by equally slow steps other species, and so on, like the branching of a great tree from a single stem, till the group becomes large. 129 On Extinction.—We have as yet spoken only incidentally of the disappearance of species and of groups of species. On the theory of natural selection the extinc­ tion of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together. The old notion of all the inhabitants of the earth having been swept away at successive periods by catas­ trophes is very generally given up, even by those geologists, as Elie de Beaumont, Murchison, Barrande, etc., whose general views would naturally lead them to this conclusion. On the contrary, we have every reason to believe, from the study of the tertiary formations, that species and groups of species gradually disappear, one after another, first from one spot, then from another, and, finally, from the world. Both single species and w’hole groups of species last for very unequal periods ; some groups, as we have seen, having endured from the earliest dawn of life to the present day ; some having disappeared before the close of the palseozoic period. No fixed law seems to determine the length of time during which any single species or any single genus endures. There is reason to believe that the complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production : if the appearance and disappearance of a group of species be represented, as before, by a vertical line of varying thickness, the line is found to taper more gradually at its upper end, which marks the progress of extermination, than at its lower end, which marks the first appearance and increase in numbers of the species. In some cases, however, the extermination of whole groups of beings, as of ammonites towards the close of the secondary period, has been wonderfully sudden. The whole subject of the extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery. Some authors have even supposed that as the individual has a definite length of life, so have species a definite duration. No one, I think, can have marvelled more at the extinction of species than I have done. When I found in La Plata the tooth of a horse embedded with the remains of Mastodon, Megatherium, Toxodon, and other extinct monsters, which all co-existed with still living shells at a very late geological period, I was filled with astonishment; for seeing that the horse, since its introduction by the Spaniards into South America, has run wild oyer the whole country, and has increased in numbers at K �1^0 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES an unparalleled rate, I asked myself what could so recently have exterminated the former horse under conditions of life apparently so favourable. But how utterly groundless was my astonishment. Pro­ fessor Owen soon perceived that the tooth, though so like that of the existing horse, belonged to an extinct species. Had this horse been still living, but in some degree rare, no naturalist would have felt the least surprise at its rarity; for rarity is the attribute of a vast number of species of all classes, in all cou ltries. If we ask ourselves why this or that species is rare, we answer that something is unfavourable in its con­ ditions of life ; but what that something is, we can hardly ever tell. On the supposi­ tion of the fossil horse still existing as a rare species, we might have felt certain from the analogy of all other animals, even of the slow-breeding elephant, and from the history of the naturalisation of the domestic horse in South America, that under more favourable conditions it would in a very few years have stocked the whole continent. But we could not have told what the unfavourable conditions were which checked its increase, whether some one or several contingencies, and at what period of the horse’s life, and in what degree, they severally acted. If the con­ ditions had gone on, however slowly, becoming less and less favourable, we assuredly should not have perceived the fact, yet the fossil horse would certainly have become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct—its place being seized on by some more successful competitor. It is most difficult always to remember that the increase of every living being is constantly being checked by unperceived injurious agencies, and that these same unperceived agencies are amply sufficient to cause rarity, and finally extinction. We see in many cases in the more recent tertiary formations that rarity precedes extinction; and we know that this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man’s agency. I may repeat what I published in 1845—namely, that to admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct—to feel no surprise at the rarity of a species, and yet to marvel greatly when it ceases to exist, is much the same as to admit that sickness in the indivi­ dual is the forerunner of death—to feel no surprise fat sickness, but when the sick man dies, to wonder and to suspect that he died by some unknown deed of violence. The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety, and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition ; and the con­ sequent extinction of less favoured forms almost inevitably follows. It is the same with our domestic productions: when a new and slightly improved variety has been raised, it at first supplants the less improved varieties in the same neigh­ bourhood ; when much improved, it is transported far and near, like our short­ horn cattle, and takes the place of other breeds in other countries. Thus the ap­ pearance of new forms and the disappear­ ance of old forms, both natural and artificial, are bound together. In certain flourishing groups the number of new specific forms which have been produced within a given time is probably greater than that of the old specific forms which have been exterminated; but we know that the number of species has not gone on indefinitely increasing, at least during the later geological periods, so that, looking to later times, we may believe that the pro­ duction of new forms has caused the extinction of about the same number of old forms. The competition will generally be most severe, as formerly explained and illustrated by examples, between the forms which are most like each other in all respects; Hence the improved and modified descendants of a species will generally cause the extermi­ nation of the parent-species ; and if many new forms have been developed from any one species, the nearest allies of that species —z>., the species of the same genus—will be the most liable to extermination. Thus, as I believe, a number of new species des­ cended from one species—that is, a new genus—comes to supplant an old genus, belonging to the same family. But it must often have happened that a new species belonging to some one group will have seized on the place occupied by a species belonging to a distinct group, and thus caused its extermination; and if many allied forms be developed from the suc­ cessful intruder, many will have to yield their places; and it will generally be allied forms which will suffer from some inherited inferiority in common. But whether it be species belonging to the same or to a distinct class, which yield their places to �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS other species which have been modified or improved, a few of the sufferers may often long be preserved, from being fitted to some peculiar line of life, or from in­ habiting some distant and isolated station, where they have escaped severe compe­ tition. For instance, a single species of Trigonia, a great genus of shells in the secondary formations, survives in the Aus­ tralian seas ; and a few members of the great and almost extinct group of Ganoid fishes still inhabit our fresh waters. There­ fore, the utter extinction of a group is generally, as we have seen, a slower pro­ cess than its production. With respect to the apparently sudden extermination of whole families or orders, as of Trilobites at the close of the palaeo­ zoic period, and of Ammonites at the close of the secondary period, we must remem­ ber what has been already said on the probable wide intervals of time between our consecutive formations ; and in these intervals there may have been much slow extermination. Moreover, when by sudden immigration or by unusually rapid develop­ ment, many species of a new group have taken possession of a new area, they will have exterminated in a correspondingly rapid manner many of the old inhabitants; and the forms which thus yield their places will commonly be allied, for they will par­ take of some inferiority in common. Thus, as it seems to me, the manner in which single species and whole groups of species become extinct accords well with the theory of natural selection. We need not marvel at extinction; if we must marvel, let it be at our presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies on which the exist­ ence of each species depends. If we forget for an instant that each species tends to increase inordinately, and that some check is always in action, yet seldom perceived by us, the whole economy of nature will be utterly obscured. Whenever we can pre­ cisely say why this species is more abundant in individuals than that; why this species and not another can be naturalised in a given country ; then, and not till then, we may justly feel surprised why we cannot account for the extinction of this particular species or group of species. On the Forms of Life changing almost simultaneously throughout the "World.—■ Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than the fact that the forms of life change almost simultaneously i31 throughout the world. Thus our European Chalk formation can be recognised in many distant parts of the world, under the most different climates, where not a fragment of the mineral chalk itself can be found— namely, in North America, in equatorial South America, in Tierra del Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in the peninsula of India. For at these distant points the organic remains in certain beds present an unmistakeable degree of resemblance to those of the Chalk. It is not that the same species are met with ; for in some cases not one species is identically the same, but they belong to the same families, genera, and sections of genera, and sometimes are similarly characterised in such trifling points as mere superficial sculpture. More­ over, other forms which are not found in the Chalk of Europe, but which occur in the formations either above or below, are similarly absent at these distant points of the world. In the several successive palaeozoic formations of Russia, Western Europe, and North America a similar parallelism in the forms of life has been observed by several authors : so it is, ac­ cording to Lyell, with the several European and North American tertiary deposits. Even if the few fossil species which are common to the Old and' New Worlds be kept wholly out of view, the general parallel­ ism in the successive forms of life, in the stages of the widely-separated palaeozoic and tertiary periods, would still be manifest, and the several formations could be easily correlated. These observations, however, relate to the marine inhabitants of distant parts of the world : we have not sufficient data to judge whether the productions of the land and of fresh water change at distant points in the same parallel manner. We may doubt whether they have thus changed : if the Megatherium, Mylodon, Macrauchenia, and Toxodon had been brought to Europe from La Plata, without any information in regard to their geological position, no one would have suspected that they had co­ existed with still living sea-shells ; but as these anomalous monsters co-existed with the Mastodon and Horse, it might at least have been inferred that they had lived during one of the later tertiary stages. When the marine forms of life are spoken of as having changed simultaneously throughout the world, it must not be sup­ posed that this expression relates to the same thousandth or hundred-thousandth year, or even that it has a very strict �132 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES geological sense; for if all the marine animals which live at the present day in Europe, and all those that lived in Europe duri ng the pleistocene period (an enormously remote period as measured by years, in­ cluding the whole glacial epoch), were to be compared with those now living in South America or in Australia, the most skilful naturalist would hardly be able to say whether the existing or the pleistocene in­ habitants of Europe resembled most closely those of the southern hemisphere. So, again, several highly-competent observers believe that the existing productions of the United States are more closely related to those which lived in Europe during certain later tertiary stages than to those which now live here ; and, if this be so, it is evident that fossiliferous beds deposited at the present day on the shores of North America would hereafter be liable to be classed with somewhat older European beds. Nevertheless, looking to a remotely-future epoch, there can, I think, be little doubt that all the more modern marine formations—namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene, and strictly modern beds, of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are only found in the older underlying deposits —would be correctly ranked as simultaneous in a geological sense. The fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously in the above large sense, at distant parts of the world, has greatly struck those admirable observers, MM.de Verneuil and d’Archiac. After referring to the paral­ lelism of the palaeozoic forms of life in various parts of Europe, they add : “ If, struck by this strange sequence, we turn our attention to North America, and there discover a series of analogous phenomena, it will appear certain that all these modifi­ cations of species, their extinction, and the introduction of new ones, cannot be owing to mere changes in marine currents or other causes more or less local and temporary, but depend on general laws which govern the whole animal kingdom.” M. Barrande has made forcible remarks to precisely the same effect. It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or other physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates. We must, as Barrande has remarked, look to some special law. We shall see this more clearly when we treat of the present distribution of organic beings, and find how slight is the relation between the physical conditions of various countries and the nature of their inhabitants. This great fact of the parallel succes­ sion of the forms of life throughout the world is explicable on the theory of natural selection. New species are formed by new varieties arising which have some advan­ tage over older forms ; and those forms which are already dominant, or have some advantage over the other forms in their own country, would naturally oftenest give rise to new varieties or incipient species ; for these latter must be victorious in a still higher degree in order to be preserved and to survive. We have distinct evidence on this head in the plants which are dominant—that is, which are commonest in their own homes, and are most widely diffused, having produced the greatest number of new varieties. It is also natural that the dominant, varying, and farspreading species, which already have invaded to a certain extent the territories of other species, should be those which would have the best chance of spreading still further, and of giving rise in new countries to new varieties and species. The process of diffusion may often be very slow, being dependent on climatal and geographical changes, or on strange acci­ dents ; but, in the long run, the dominant forms will generally succeed in spreading. The diffusion would, it is probable, be slower with the terrestrial inhabitants of distinct continents than with the marine inhabitants of the continuous sea. We might, therefore, expect to find, as we apparently do find, a less strict degree of parallel succession in the productions of the land than of the sea. Dominant species spreading from any region might encounter still more dominant species, and then their triumphant course^ or even their existence, would cease. We know not at all precisely what are all the conditions most favourable for the multi­ plication of new and dominant species ; but we can, I think, clearly see that a number of individuals, from giving a better chance of the appearance of favourable variations, and that severe competition with many already existing forms, would be highly favourable, as would be the power of spreading into new territories. A certain amount of isolation, recurring at long intervals of time, would probably be also favourable, as before explained. One �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS quarter of the world, may have been most favourable for the production of new and dominant species on the land, and another for those in the waters of the sea. If two great regions had been for a long period favourably circumstanced in an equal degree, whenever their inhabitants met the battle would be prolonged and severe, and some from one birthplace and some from the ether might be victorious. But, in the course of time, the forms dominant in the highest degree, wherever produced, would tend everywhere to prevail. As they prevailed, they would cause the extinc­ tion of other and inferior forms ; and as these inferior forms would be allied in groups by inheritance, whole groups would tend slowly to disappear, though here and there a single member might long be enabled to survive. Thus, as it seems to me, the parallel, and, taken in a large sense, simultaneous, suc­ cession of the same forms of life throughout the world accords well with the principle of new species having been formed by dominant species spreading widely and varying : the new species thus produced being themselves dominant owing to in­ heritance, and to having already had some advantage over their parents or over other species; these again spreading, varying, and producing new species. The forms which are beaten and which yield their places to the new and victorious forms, will generally be allied in groups, from inherit­ ing some inferiority in common; and there­ fore, as new and improved groups spread throughout the world, old groups will disappear from the world, and the succes­ sion of forms in both ways will everywhere tend to correspond. There is one other remark connected with this subject worth making. I have given my reasons for believing that all our greater fossiliferous formations were de­ posited during periods of subsidence, and that blank intervals of vast duration occur­ red during the periods when the bed of the sea was either stationary or rising, and likewise when sediment was not thrown down quickly enough to embed and preserve organic remains. During these long and blank intervals I suppose that the inhabi­ tants of each region underwent a consider­ able amount of modification and extinction, and that there was much migration from other parts of the world. As we have reason to believe that large areas are affected by the same movement, it is pro­ bable that strictly contemporaneous forma­ 133 tions have often been accumulated over very wide spaces in the same quarter of the world ; but we are far from having any right to conclude that this has invariably been the case, and that large areas have invariably been affected by the same move­ ments. When two formations have been deposited in two regions during nearly, but not exactly, the same period, we should find in both, from the causes explained in the foregoing paragraphs, the same general succession in the forms of life ; but the species would not exactly correspond, for there will have been a little more time in the one region than in the other for modifi­ cation, extinction, and immigration. I suspect that cases of this nature occur in Europe. Mr. Prestwich, in his admirable Memoirs on the eocene deposits of England and France, is able to draw a close general parallelism between the successive stages in the two countries;; but when he compares certain stages in England with those in France, although he finds in both a curious accordance in the numbers of the species belonging to the same genera, yet the species themselves differ in a manner very difficult to account for, considering the proximity of the two areas—unless, indeed, it be assumed that an isthmus separated two seas inhabited by distinct, but con­ temporaneous, faunas. Lyell has made similar observations on some of the later tertiary formations. Barrande also shows that there is a striking general parallelism in the successive Silurian deposits of Bohemia and Scandinavia ; nevertheless, he finds a surprising amount of difference in the species. If the several formations in these regions have not been deposited during the same exact periods—a formation in one region often corresponding with a blank interval in the other—and if in both regions the species have gone on slowly changing during the accumulation of the several formations and during the long intervals of time between them—in this case, the several formations in the two regions could be arranged in the same order, in accordance with the general succession of the form of life, and the order would falsely appear to be strictly parallel; nevertheless, the species would not all be the same in the apparently corresponding stages in the two regions. On the Affinities of extinct Species to each other and to living forms.—Let us now look to the mutual affinities of extinct and I living species. They all fall into one grand �134 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES natural system; and this fact is at once explained on the principle of descent. The more ancient any form is, the more, as a general rule, it differs from living forms. But, as Buckland long ago remarked, all fossils can be classed either in still existing groups or between them. That the extinct forms of life help to fill up the wide intervals between existing genera, families, and orders cannot be disputed. For if we confine our attention either to the living or to the extinct alone, the series is far less perfect than if we combine both into one general system. With respect to the Vertebrata, whole pages could be filled with striking illustrations from our great palaeontologist, Owen, showing how extinct animals fall in between existing groups. Cuvier ranked the Ruminants and Pachy­ derms as the two most distinct orders of mammals ; but Owen has discovered so many fossil links that he has had to alter the whole classification of these two orders, and has placed certain pachyderms in the same sub-order with ruminants : for example, he dissolves by fine gradations the apparently wide difference between the pig and the camel. In regard to the Invertebrata, Barrande (and a higher authority could not be named) asserts that he is every day taught that palaeozoic animals, though belonging to the same orders, families, or genera with those living at the present day, were not at this early epoch limited in such distinct groups as they now are. Some writers have objected to any extinct species or group of species being considered as intermediate between living species or groups. If by this term it is meant that an extinct form is directly intermediate in all its characters between two living forms, the objection is probably valid. But I apprehend that in a perfectly natural classi­ fication many fossil species would have to stand between living species, and some extinct genera between living genera, even between genera belonging to distinct families. The most common case, espe­ cially with respect to very distinct groups, such as fish and reptiles, seems to be that, supposing them to be distinguished at the present day from each other by a dozen characters, the ancient members of the same two groups would be distinguished by a somewhat lesser number of characters, so that the two groups, though formerly quite distinct, at that period made some small approach to each other. ancient a form is, by so much the more it tends to connect by some of its characters groups now widely separated from each other. This remark, no doubt, must be restricted to those groups which have undergone much change in the course of geological ages; and it would be difficult to prove the truth of the proposition, for every now and then even a living animal, as the Lepidosiren, is discovered having affinities directed towards very distinct groups. Yet if we compare the older Reptiles and Batrachians, the older Fish, the older Cephalopods, and the eocene Mammals, with the more recent members of the same classes, we must admit that there is some truth in the remark. Let us see how far these several facts and inferences accord with the theory of descent with modification. As the subject is somewhat complex, I must request the reader to turn to the diagram in the pre­ liminary. We may suppose that the num­ bered letters represent genera, and the dotted lines diverging from them the species in each genus. The diagram is much too simple, too few genera and too few species being given ; but this is unim­ portant for us. The horizontal lines may represent successive geological formations, and all the forms beneath the uppermost line may be considered as extinct. The three existing genera, «14, y14, />r4, will form a small family ; £14 and_/14, a closely allied family or sub-family ; and 014, z?14, /zz'4, a third family. These three families, together with the many extinct genera on the several lines of descent diverging from the parent­ form (A), will form an order; for all will have inherited something in common from their ancient and common progenitor. On the principle of the continued tendency to divergence of character, which was formerly illustrated by this diagram, the more recent any form is, the more it will generally differ from its ancient progenitor. Hence we can understand the rule that the most ancient fossils differ most from existing forms. We must not, however, assume that divergence of character is a necessary contingency; it depends solely on the descendants from a species being thus enabled to seize on many and dif­ ferent places in the economy of nature. Therefore, it is quite possible, as we have seen in the case of some Silurian forms, that a species might go on being slightly modified in relation to its slightly altered conditions of life, and yet retain through­ It is a common belief that the more out a vast period the same general �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS characteristics. This is represented in the diagram by the letter F14. All the many forms, extinct and recent, descended from (A) make, as before re­ marked, one order ; and this order, from the continued effects of extinction and divergence of character, has become divided into several sub-families and families, some of which are supposed to have perished at different periods, and some to have endured to the present day. By looking at the diagram we can see that, if many of the extinct forms supposed to be embedded in the successive forma­ tions were discovered at several points low down in the series, the three existing families on the uppermost line would be rendered less distinct from each other. If, for instance, the genera a1, «3, zzI0,y8, ;/z3, z/z6, w9, were disinterred, these three families would be so closely linked together that they probably would have to be united into one great family, in nearly the same manner as has occurred with ruminants and pachyderms. Yet he who objected to call the extinct genera, which thus linked the living genera of three families together, intermediate in character would be justi­ fied, as they are intermediate, not directly, but only by a long and circuitous course through many widely different forms. If many extinct forms were to be discovered above one of the middle horizontal lines or geological formations—for instance, above No. VI.—but none from beneath this line, then only the two families on the left hand (namely, <z14, etc., and £'4, etc.) would have to be united into one family ; and the two other families (namely, zz'4 to /t4, now in­ cluding five genera, and z>'4 to 7/z14) would yet remain distinct. These two families, however, would be less distinct from each other than they were before the discovery of the fossils. If, for instance, we suppose the existing genera of the two families to differ from each other by a dozen char­ acters, in this case the genera, at the early period marked VI., would differ by a lesser number of characters ; for at this early stage of descent they have not diverged in character from the common progenitor of the order nearly so much as they subse­ quently diverged. Thus it comes that ancient and extinct genera are often in some slight degree intermediate in char­ acter between their modified descendants, or between their collateral relations. In nature the case will be far more com­ plicated than is represented in the diagram ; for the groups will have been more nume­ 135 rous, they will have endured for extremely unequal lengths of time, and will have been modified in various degrees. As we possess only the last volume of the geo­ logical record, and that in a very broken condition, we have no right to expect, except in very rare cases, to fill up wide intervals in the natural system, and thus unite distinct families or orders. All that we have a right to expect is that those groups which have within known geo­ logical periods undergone much modifica­ tion should in the older formations make some slight approach to each other ; so that the older members should differ less from each other in some of their characters than do the existing members of the same groups ; and this by the concurrent evi­ dence of our best palaeontologists seems frequently to be the case. Thus on the theory of descent with modification the main facts with respect to the mutual affinities of the extinct forms of life to each other and to living forms seem to me explained in a satisfactory manner. And they are wholly inexplicable on any other view. On this same theory, it is evident that the fauna of any great period in the earth’s history will be intermediate in general character between that which preceded and that which succeeded it. Thus the species which lived at the sixth great stage of descent in the diagram are the modified offspring of those which lived at the fifth stage, and are the parents of those which became still more modified at the seventh stage ; hence they could hardly fail to be nearly intermediate in character between the forms of life above and below. We must, however, allow for the entire extinc­ tion of some preceding founs, and in any one region for the immigration of new forms from other regions, and for a large amount of modification, during the long and blank intervals between the successive formations. Subject to these allowances, the fauna of each geological period undoubtedly is inter­ mediate in character between the preced­ ing and succeeding faunas. I need give only one instance—namely, the manner in which the fossils of the Devonian system, when this system was first discovered, were at once recognised by palaeontologists as intermediate in character between those of the overlying carboniferous and underlying Silurian system. But each fauna is not necessarily exactly intermediate, as unequal intervals of time have elapsed between con­ secutive formations, �136 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES It is no real objection to the truth of the statement, that the fauna of each period as a whole is nearly intermediate in character between the preceding and succeeding faunas, that certain genera offer exceptions to the rule. For instance, mastodons and elephants, when arranged by Dr. Falconer in two series, first according to their mutual affinities and then according to their periods of existence, do not accord in arrangement. The species extreme in character are not the oldest or the most recent; nor are those which are intermediate in character, intermediate in age. But supposing for an instant, in this and other such cases, that the record of the first appearance and dis­ appearance of the species was perfect, we have no reason to believe that forms suc­ cessively produced necessarily endure for corresponding lengths of time : a very ancient form might occasionally last much longer than a form elsewhere subsequently produced, especially in the case of terres­ trial productions inhabiting separated dis­ tricts. To compare small things with great: if the principal living and extinct races of the domestic pigeon were arranged as well as they could be in serial affinity, this arrangement would not closely accord with the order in time of their production, and still less with the order of their disappear­ ance ; for the parent rock-pigeon now lives, and many varieties between the rock-pigeon and the carrier have become extinct; and carriers which are extreme in the important character of length of beak originated earlier than short-beaked tumblers, which are at the opposite end of the series in this same respect. Closely connected with the statement, that the organic remains from an inter­ mediate formation are in some degree intermediate in character, is the fact, insisted on by all palaeontologists, that fossils from two consecutive formations are far more closely related to each other than are the fossils from two remote formations. Pictet gives as a well-known instance the general resemblance of the organic remains from the several stages of the Chalk formation, though the species are distinct in each stage. This fact alone, from its generality, seems to have shaken Professor Pictet in his firm belief in the immutability of species. He who is acquainted with the distribution of existing species over the globe will not attempt to account for the close resemblance of the distinct species in closely-consecutive formations by the physical conditions of the ancient areas having remained nearly the same. Let it be remembered that the forms of life, at least those inhabiting the sea, have changed almost simultaneously throughout the world, and therefore under the most different climates and conditions. Consider the prodigious vicissitudes of climate during the pleistocene period, which includes the whole glacial period, and note how little the specific forms of the inhabitants of the sea have been affected. On the theory of descent, the full meaning of the fact of fossil remains from closely-consecutive formations, though ranked as distinct species, being closely related is obvious. As the accumulation of each formation has often been inter­ rupted, and as long blank intervals have intervened between successive formations, we ought not to expect to find, as I attempted to show in the last chapter, in any one or two formations all the inter­ mediate varieties between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of these periods; but we ought to find after intervals, very long as measured by years, but only moderately long as measured geologically, closely-allied forms, or, as they have been called by some authors, representative species; and these we assuredly do find. We find, in short, such evidence of the slow and scarcely sensible mutation of specific forms as we have a just right to expect to find. On the state of Development of Ancient Forms.—There has been much discussion whether recent forms are more highly developed than ancient. I will not here enter on this subject, for naturalists have not as yet defined to each other’s satisfac­ tion what is meant by high and low forms. The best definition probably is that the higher forms have their organs more dis­ tinctly specialised for different functions ; and, as such division of physiological labour seems to be an advantage to each being, natural selection will constantly tend insofar to make the later and more modified forms higher than their early progenitors, or than the slightly modified descendants of such progenitors. In a more general sense, the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancient; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and pre­ ceding forms. If, under a nearly similar climate, the eocene inhabitants of one quarter of the world were put into �ON THE GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF ORGANIC BEINGS competition with the existing inhabitants of the same or some other quarter, the eocene fauna or flora would certainly be beaten and exterminated, as would a secondary fauna by an eocene and a palaeozoic fauna by a secondary fauna. I do not doubt that this process of improvement has affected in a marxed and sensible manner the organisation of the more recent and victorious forms of life, in comparison with the ancient and beaten forms ; but I can see no way of testing this sort of progress. Crustaceans, for instance, not the highest in their own class, may have beaten the highest molluscs. From the extraordinary manner in which European productions have recently spread over New Zealand, and have seized on places which must have been previously occupied, we may believe, if all the animals and plants of Great Britain were set free in New Zealand, that in the course of time a multitude of British forms would become thoroughly naturalised there, and would exterminate many of the natives. On the other hand, from what we now see occur­ ring in New Zealand, and from hardly a single inhabitant of the southern hemi­ sphere having become wild in any part of Europe, we may doubt, if all the produc­ tions of New Zealand were set free in Great Britain, whether any considerable number would be enabled to seize on places now occupied by our native plants and animals. Under this point of view, the productions of Great Britain may be said to be higher than those of New Zealand. Yet the most skilful naturalist, from an examination of the species of the two countries, could not have foreseen this result. Agassiz insists that ancient animals resemble, to a certain extent, the embryos of recent animals of the same classes, or that the geological succession of extinct forms is in some degree parallel to the embryological development of recent forms. I must follow Pictet and Huxley in thinking that the truth of this doctrine is very far from proved. Yet I fully expect to see it hereafter confirmed, at least in regard to subordinate groups, which have branched off from each other within comparatively recent times. For this doctrine of Agassiz accords well with the theory of natural selection. In a future chapter I shall attempt to show that the adult differs from its embryo, owing to variations supervening at a not early age and being inherited at a corresponding age. This process, while 137 it leaves the embryo almost unaltered, con­ tinually adds, in the course of successive generations, more and more difference to the adult. Thus the embryo comes to be left as a sort of picture, preserved by nature, of the ancient and less modified condition of each animal. This view may be true, and yet it may never be capable of full proof. Seeing, for instance, that the oldest known mammals, reptiles, and fish strictly belong to their own proper classes, though some of these old forms are in a slight degree less distinct from each other than are the typical members of the same groups at the present day, it would be vain to look for animals having the common embryological character of the Vertebrata until beds far beneath the lowest Silurian strata are dis­ covered—a discovery of which the chance is very small. On the Succession of the same Types within the same areas during the later tertiary -periods.—Mr. Clift, many years ago, showed that the fossil mammals from the Australian caves were closely allied to the living marsupials of that continent. In South America a similar relationship is manifest, even to an uneducated eye, in the gigantic pieces of armour like those of the armadillo, found in several parts of La Plata ; and Professor Owen has shown in the most striking manner that most of the fossil mammals, buried there in such numbers, are related to South American types. This relationship is even more clearly seen in the wonderful collection of fossil bones made by MM. Lund and Clausen in the caves of Brazil. I was so much impressed with these facts that I strongly insisted, in 1839 and 1845, on this “ law of the succession of types ”—on “ this wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living.” Pro­ fessor Owen has subsequently extended the same generalisation to the mammals of the Old World. We see the same law in this author’s restorations of the extinct and gigantic birds of New Zealand. We see it also in the birds of the caves of Brazil. Mr. Woodward has shown that the same law holds good with sea-shells; but, from the wide distribution of most genera of molluscs, it is not well displayed by them. Other cases could be added, as the relation between the extinct and living land-shells of Madeira, and between the extinct and living brackish-water shells of the AraloCaspian Sea. �140 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES formations are more closely allied to each other than are those of remote formations, for the forms are more closely linked together by generation: we can clearly see why the remains of an intermediate formation are intermediate in character. The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, insofar, higher in the scale of nature ; and this may account for that vague, yet illdefined sentiment, felt by many palaeonto­ logists, that organisation on the whole has progressed. If it should hereafter be proved that ancient animals resemble, to a certain extent, the embryos of more recent animals of the same class, the fact will be intelligible. The succession of the same types of structure within the same areas during the later geological periods ceases to be mysterious, and is simply explained by inheritance. If, then, the geological record be as imperfect as I believe it to be, and it may, at least, be asserted that the record cannot be proved to be much more perfect, the main objections to the theory of natural selection are greatly diminished or dis­ appear. On the other hand, all the chief laws of palaeontology plainly proclaim, as it seems to me, that species have been produced by ordinary generation : old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, produced by the laws of variation still acting around us, and preserved by natural selection. Chapter XI. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION Present distribution cannot be accounted for by differences in physical conditions—-Importance of barriers—Affinity of the productions of the same continent—Centres of creation—Means of dispersal, by changes of climate and of the level of the land, and by occasional means—■ Dispersal during the Glacial period co-extensive with the world. In considering the distribution of organic beings over the face of the globe, the first great fact which strikes us is that neither the similarity nor the dissimilarity of the inhabitants of various regions can be accounted for by their climatal and other physical conditions. Of late almost every author who has studied the subject has come to this conclusion. The case of America alone would almost suffice to prove its truth; for if we exclude the northern parts, where the circumpolar land is almost continuous, all authors agree that one of the most fundamental divisions in geo­ graphical distribution is that between the New and Old Worlds; yet, if we travel over the vast American continent, from the central parts of the United States to its extreme southern point, we meet with the most diversified conditions; the most humid districts, arid deserts, lofty mountains, grassy plains, forests, marshes, lakes, and great rivers, under almost every tempera­ ture. There is hardly a climate or condi­ tion in the Old World which cannot be paralleled in the New—at least as closely as the same species generally require ; for it is a most rare case to find a group of organisms confined to any small spot having conditions peculiar in only a slight degree ; for instance, small areas in the Old World could be pointed out hotter than any in the New World, yet these are not inhabited by a peculiar fauna or flora. Notwithstanding this parallelism in the conditions of the Old and New Worlds, how widely different are their living pro­ ductions 1 In the southern hemisphere, if we com­ pare large tracts of land in Australia, South Africa, and western South America, between latitudes 250 and 35’, we shall find parts extremely similar in all their conditions, yet it would not be possible to point out three faunas and floras more utterly dis­ similar. Or, again, we may compare the pro­ ductions of South America south of latitude 350 with those north of 25°, which conse­ quently inhabit a considerably different �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION climate, and they will be found incompar­ ably more closely related to each other than they are to the productions of Australia or Africa under nearly the same climate. Analogous facts could be given with respect to the inhabitants of the sea. A second great fact which strikes us in our general review is that barriers of any kind, or obstacles to free migration, are related in a close and important manner to the differences between the productions of various regions. We see this in the great difference of nearly all the terrestrial pro­ ductions of the New and Old Worlds, excepting in the northern parts, where the land almost joins, and where, under a slightly different climate, there might have been free migration for the northern tem­ perate forms, as there now is for the strictly arctic productions. We see the same fact in the great difference between the inhabi­ tants of Australia, Africa, and South America under the same latitude, for these countries are almost as much isolated from each other as is possible. On each conti­ nent also we see the same fact; for on the opposite sides of lofty and continuous mountain-ranges, and of great deserts, and sometimes even of large rivers, we find different productions; though as mountain­ chains, deserts, etc., are not as impassable, or likely to have endured so long as the oceans separating continents, the differ­ ences are very inferior in degree to those characteristic of distinct continents. Turning to the sea, we find the same law. No two marine faunas are more distinct, with hardly a fish, shell, or crab in common, than those of the eastern and western shores of South and Central America ; yet these great faunas are separated only by the narrow, but impas­ sable, isthmus of Panama. Westward of the shores of America a wide space of open ocean extends, with not an island as a halting-place for emigrants ; here we have a barrier of another kind, and, as soon as this is passed, we meet in the eastern islands of the Pacific with another and totally distinct fauna. So that here three marine faunas range far northward and southward, in parallel lines not far from each other, under corresponding climates ; but from being separated from each other by impassable barriers, either of land or open sea, they are wholly dis­ tinct. On the other hand, proceeding still further westward from the eastern islands ■ of the tropical parts of the Pacific, we encounter no impassable barriers, and we 141 have innumerable islands as halting-places, or continuous coasts, until, after travelling over a hemisphere, we come to the shores of Africa; and over this vast space we meet with no well-defined and distinct marine faunas. Although hardly one shell, crab, or fish is common to the above-named three approximate faunas of Eastern and Western America and the eastern Pacific islands, yet many fish range from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, and many shells are common to the eastern islands of the Pacific and the eastern shores of Africa, on almost exactly opposite meridians of longitude. A third great fact, partly included in the foregoing statements, is the affinity of the productions of the same continent or sea, though the species themselves are distinct at different points and stations. It is a law of the widest generality, and every continent offers innumerable instances. Nevertheless, the naturalist, in travelling, for instance, from north to south, never fails to be struck by the manner in which succes­ sive groups of beings, specifically distinct, yet clearly related, replace each other. He hears from closely-allied yet distinct kinds of birds notes nearly similar, and sees their nests similarly constructed, but not quite alike, with eggs coloured in nearly the same manner. The plains near the Straits of Magellan are inhabited by one species of Rhea (American ostrich), and northward the plains of La Plata by another species of the same genus, and not by a true ostrich or emu, like those found in Africa and Australia under the same latitude. On these same plains of La Plata we see the agouti and bizcacha, animals having nearly the same habits as our haresand rabbits, and.belonging to the same order of Rodents; but they plainly display an American type of structure. We ascend the lofty peaks of the Cordillera,, and we find an alpine species of bizcacha ; we look to the waters, and we do not find the beaver or musk-rat, but the coypu and capybara, rodents of the American type. Innumerable other instances could be given. If we look to the islands off the American shore, however much they may differ in geological structure, the inhabitants, though they may be all peculiar species, are essentially American. We may look back to past ages, as shown in the last chapter, and we find American types then prevalent on the American continent and in the American seas. We see in these facts some deep organic bond, prevailing throughout �142 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES space and time, over the same areas of land and water, and independent of their physical conditions. The naturalist must feel little curiosity who is not led to inquire what this bond is. This bond, on my theory, is simply inheritance, that cause which alone, as far as we positively know, produces organisms quite like, or, as we see in the case of varieties, nearly like each other. The dis­ similarity of the inhabitants of different regions may be attributed to modification through natural selection, and in a quite subordinate degree to the direct influence of different physical conditions. The degree of dissimilarity will depend on the migration of the more dominant forms of life from one region into another having been effected with more or less ease, at periods more or less remote—on the nature and number of the former immigrants— and on their action and reaction in their mutual struggles for life—the relation of organism to organism being, as I have already often remarked, the most impor­ tant of all relations. Thus the high importance of barriers comes into play by checking migration ; as does time for the slow process of modification through natural selection. Widely-ranging species, abounding in individuals, which have already triumphed over many competitors in their own widely-extended homes will have the best chance of seizing on new places when they spread into new coun­ tries. In their new homes they will be exposed to new conditions, and will fre­ quently undergo further modification and improvement; and thus they will become still further victorious, and will produce groups of modified descendants. On this principle of inheritance with modifica­ tion, we can understand how it is that sections of genera, whole genera, and even families, are confined to the same areas, as is so commonly and notoriously the case. I believe, as was remarked in the last chapter, in no law of necessary develop­ ment. As the variability of each species is an independent property, and will be taken advantage of by natural selection, only so far as it profits the individual in its complex struggle for life, so the degree of modification in different species will be no uniform quantity. If, for instance, a number of specieswhich stand in direct com­ petition with each other migrate in a body into a new and afterwards isolated country, they will be little liable to modification ; for neither migration nor isolation in them­ selves can do anything. These principles come into play only by bringing organisms into new relations with each other, and in a lesser degree with the surrounding phy­ sical conditions. As we have seen in the last chapter that some forms have retained nearly the same character from an enor­ mously remote geological period, so certain species have migrated over vast spaces, and have not become greatly modified. On these views it is obvious that the several species of the same genus, though inhabiting the most distant quarters of the world, must originally have proceeded from the same source, as they have descended from the same progenitor. In the case of those species which have undergone during whole geological periods but little modication, there is not much difficulty in believing that they may have migrated from the same region ; for during the vast geographical and climatal changes which will have supervened since ancient times almost any amount of migration is pos­ sible. But in many other cases in which we have reason to believe that the species of a genus have been produced within comparatively recent times there is great difficulty on this head. It is also obvious that the individuals of the same species, though now iuhabiting distant and isolated regions, must have proceeded from one spot, where their parents were first produced ; for, as explained in the last chapter, it is incredible that individuals identically the same should ever have been produced through natural selection from parents specifically distinct. We are thus brought to the question which has been largely discussed by naturalists—namely, whether species have been created at one or more points of the earth’s surface. Undoubtedly there are very many cases of extreme difficulty in understanding how the same species could possibly have migrated from some one point to the several distant and isolated points where now found. Nevertheless, the simplicity of the view that each species was first produced within a single region captivates the mind. He who rejects it rejects the vera causa of ordinary gene­ ration with subsequent migration, and calls in the agency of a miracle. It is univer­ sally admitted that in most cases the area inhabited by a species is continuous ; and when a plant or animal inhabits two points so distant from each other, or with an interval of such a nature that the space �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION could not be easily passed over by migra­ tion, the fact is given as something remark­ able and exceptional. The capacity of migrating across the sea is more distinctly limited in terrestrial mammals than perhaps in any other organic beings ; and, accord­ ingly, we find no inexplicable cases of the same mammal inhabiting distant points of the world. No geologist will feel any diffi­ culty in such cases as Great Britain having been formerly united to Europe, and conse­ quently possessing the same quadrupeds. But if the same species can be produced at two separate points, why do we not find a single mammal common to Europe and Australia or South America ? The condi­ tions of life are nearly the same, so that a multitude of European animals and plants have become naturalised in America and Australia ; and some of the aboriginal plants are identically the same as these distant points of the northern and southern hemispheres. The answer, as I believe, is that mammals have not been able to migrate, whereas some plants, from their varied means of dispersal, have migrated across the vast and broken interspace. The great and striking influence which barriers of every kind have had on distribution is intelligible only on the view that the great majority of species have been produced on one side alone, and have not been able to migrate to the other side. Some few families, many sub families, very many genera, and a still greater number of sec­ tions of genera, are confined to a single region; and it has been observed by several naturalists that the most natural genera, or those genera in which the species are most closely related to each other, are generally local or confined to one area. What a strange anomaly it would be if, when coming one step lower in the series, to the individuals of the same species, a directly opposite rule prevailed, and species were not local, but had been produced in two or more distinct areas ! Hence it seems to me, as it has to many other naturalists, that the view of each species having been produced in one area alone, and having subsequently migrated from that area as far as its powers of migra­ tion and subsistence under past and present conditions permitted, is the most probable. Undoubtedly, many cases occur in which we cannot explain how the same species could have passed from one point to the other. But the geographical and climatal changes which have certainly occurred within recent geological times must have M3 interrupted or rendered discontinuous the formerly continuous range of many species. So that we are reduced to consider whether the exceptions to continuity of range are so numerous and of so grave a nature that we ought to give up the belief, rendered probable by general considerations, that each species has been produced within one area, and has migrated thence as far as it could. It would be hopelessly tedious to discuss all the exceptional cases of the same species now living at distant and separated points ; nor do I for a moment pretend that any explanation could be offered of many such cases. But, after some preliminary remarks, I will discuss a few of the most striking classes of facts—namely, the existence of the same species on the summits of distant mountain-ranges, and at distant points in the arctic and antarctic regions ; and, secondly (in the following chapter), the wide distribution of fresh­ water productions ; and, thirdly, the occur­ rence of the same terrestrial species on islands and on the mainland, though sepa­ rated by hundreds of miles of open sea. If the existence of the same species at distant and isolated points of the earth’s surface, can in many instances be explained on the view of each species having migrated from a single birthplace, then, considering our ignorance with respect to former climatal and geographical changes and various occasional means of transport, the belief that this has been the universal law seems to me incomparably the safest. In discussing this subject, we shall be enabled at the same time to consider a point equally important for us—namely, whether the several distinct species of a genus, which on my theory have all desscended from a common progenitor, can have migrated (undergoing modification during some part of their migration) from the area inhabited by their progenitor. If it can be shown to be almost invariably the case that a region of which most of its inhabitants are closely related to, or belong to the same genera with the species of a second region, has probably received at some former period immigrants from this other region, my theory will be strengthened ; for we can clearly under­ stand, on the principle of modification, why the inhabitants of a region should be related to those of another region whence it has been stocked. A volcanic island, for instance, upheaved and formed at the distance of a few hundreds of miles from a continent, would probably receive from �144 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES it in the course of time a few colonists, and their descendants, though modified, would still be plainly related by inheritance to the inhabitants of the continent. Cases of this nature are common, and are, as we shall hereafter more fully see, inexplicable on the theory of independent creation. This view of the relation of species in one region to those in another does not differ much (by substituting the word variety for species) from that lately advanced in an ingenious paper by Mr. Wallace, in which he concludes that “ every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely-allied species.” And I now know from corre­ spondence that this coincidence he attri­ butes to generation with modification. The previous remarks on “ single and multiple centres of creation ” do not directly bear on another allied question—namely, whether all the individuals of the same species have descended from a single pair, or single hermaphrodite, or whether, as some authors suppose, from many indi­ viduals simultaneously created. With those organic beings which never intercross (if such exist), the species, on my theory, must have descended from a succession of improved varieties, which will never have blended with other individuals or varieties, but will have supplanted each other ; so that at each successive stage of modifica­ tion and improvement all the individuals of each variety will have descended from a single parent. But in the majority of cases—namely, with all organisms which habitually unite for each birth, or which often intercross—I believe that during the slow process of modification the individuals of the species will have been kept nearly uniform by intercrossing; so that many individualswill have gone on simultaneously changing, and the whole amount of modifi­ cation will not have been due, at each stage, to descent from a single parent. To illustrate what I mean : Our English race-horses differ slightly from the horses of every other breed ; but they do not owe their difference and superiority to descent from any single pair, but to continued care in selecting and training many individuals during many generations. Before discussing' the three classes of facts which I have selected as presenting the greatest amount of difficulty on the theory of “single centres of creation,” I must say a few words on the means of dispersal. Means of Dispersal.—Sir C. Lyell and other authors have ably treated this subject. I can give here only the briefest abstract of the more important facts. Change of climate must have had a powerful influence on migration : a region when its climate was different may have been a high road for migration, but now be impassable. I shall, however, presently have to discuss this branch of the subject in some detail. Changes of level in the land must also have been highly influential : a narrow isthmus now separates two marine faunas ; submerge it, or let it formerly have been submerged, and the two faunas will now blend or may formerly have blended: where the sea now extends, land may at a former period have connected islands or possibly even continents together, and thus have allowed terrestrial productions to pass from one to the other. No geologist will dispute that great mutations of level have occurred within the period of existing organisms, Edward Forbes insisted that all the islands in the Atlantic must recently have been connected with Europe or Africa, and Europe likewise with America. Other authors have thus hypothetically bridged over every ocean and have united almost every island to some mainland. If, indeed, the arguments used by Forbes are to be trusted, it must be admitted that scarcely a single island exists which has not recently been united to some continent. This view cuts the Gordian knot of the dispersal of the same species to the most distant points, and removes many a diffi­ culty ; but to the best of my judgment we are not authorised in admitting such enor­ mous geographical changes within the period of existing species. It seems to me that we have abundant evidence of great oscillations of level in our continents; but not of such vast changes in their position and extension as to have united them within the recent period to each other and to the several intervening oceanic islands. I freely admit the former existence of many islands, now buried beneath the sea, which may have served as haltingplaces for plants and for many animals during their migration. In the coral­ producing oceans such sunken islands are now marked, as I believe, by rings of coral or atolls standing over them. Whenever it is fully admitted, as I believe it will some day be, that each species has pro­ ceeded from a single birthplace, and when in the course of time we know something defiilite about the means of distribution, �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION we shall be enabled to speculate with security on the former extension of the land. But I do not believe that it will ever be proved that within the recent period continents which are now quite separate have been continuously, or almost con­ tinuously, united with each other, and with the many existing oceanic islands. Several facts in distribution—such as the great differences in the marine faunas on the opposite sides of almost every continent— the close relation of the tertiary inhabi­ tants of several lands and even seas to their present inhabitants—a ceitain degree of relation (as we shall hereafter see) between the distribution of mammals and the depth of the sea—these and other such facts seem to me opposed to the admission of such prodigious geographical revolutions within the recent period as are necessitated on the view advanced by Forbes and ad­ mitted by many of his followers. The nature and relative proportions of the inhabitants of oceanic islands likewise seem to me opposed to the belief of their former continuity with continents. Nor does their almost universally volcanic com­ position favour the admission that they are the wrecks of sunken continents—if they had originally existed as mountain­ ranges on the land, some at least of the islands would have been formed, like other mountain summits, of granite, metamorphic schists, old fossiliferous or other such rocks, instead of consisting of mere piles of vol­ canic matter. I must now say a few words on what are called accidental means, but which more properly might be called occasional means, of distribution. I shall here confine myself to plants. In botanical works this or that plant is stated to be ill adapted for wide dissemination; but for transport across the sea the greater or less facilities may be said to be almost wholly unknown. Until I tried, with Mr. Berkeley’s aid, a few experiments, it was not even known how far seeds could resist the injurious action of sea-water. To my surprise, I found that, out of 87 kinds, 64 germinated after an immersion of 28 days, and a few survived an immersion of 137 days. For convenience sake, I chiefly tried small seeds, without the capsule or fruit; and, as all of these sank in a few days, they could not be floated across wide spaces of the sea, whether or not they were injured by the salt-water. Afterwards I tried some larger fruits, capsules, etc., and some of these floated for a long time. It is well 145 known what a difference there is in the buoyancy of green and seasoned timber; and it occurred to me that floods might wash down plants or branches, and that these might be dried on the banks, and then by a fresh rise in the stream be washed into the sea. Hence I was led to dry stems and branches of 94 plants with ripe fruit, and to place them on sea-water. The majority sank quickly, but some which while green floated for a very short time, when dried floated much longer; for instance, ripe hazel-nuts sank immediately, but when dried they floated for 90 days, and afterwards when planted they ger­ minated ; an asparagus plant with ripe berries floated for 23 days, when dried it floated for 85 days, and the seeds after­ wards germinated; the ripe seeds of Helosciadium sank in 2 days, when dried they floated for above 90 days, and afterwards germinated. Altogether out of the 94 dried plants, 18 floated for above 28 days, and some of the 18 floated for a very much longer period. So that as seeds germi­ nated after an immersion of 28 days, and as || plants with ripe fruit (but not all the same species as in the foregoing experi­ ment) floated, after being dried, for above 28 days, as far as we may infer anything from these scanty facts, we may conclude that the seeds of plants of any country might be floated by sea-currents during 28 days, and would retain their power of germination. In Johnston’s Physical Atlas the average rate of the several Atlantic currents is 33 miles per diem (some currents running at the rate of 60 miles per diem); on this average, the seeds of plants belonging to one country might be floated across 924 miles of sea to another country; and when stranded, if blown to a favour­ able spot by an inland gale, they would germinate. Subsequently to my experiments, M. Martens tried similar ones, but in a much better manner, for he placed the seeds in a box in the actual sea, so that they were alternately wet and exposed to the air like really floating plants. He tried 98 seeds, mostly different from mine ; but he chose many large fruits and likewise seeds from plants which live near the sea ; and this would have favoured the average length of their flotation and of their resistance to the injurious action of the salt-water. On the other hand, he did not previously dry the plants or branches with the fruit; and this, as we have seen, would have caused some of them to have floated much longer. The L 1 �146 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES result was that |f of his seeds floated for 42 days, and were then capable of germina­ tion. But I do not doubt that plants exposed to the waves would float for a less time than those protected from violent movement, as in our experiments. There­ fore, it would perhaps be safer to assume that the seeds of about rVT plants of a flora, after having been dried, could be floated across a space of sea 900 miles in width, and would then germinate. The fact of the larger fruits often floating longer than the small is interesting ; as plants with large seeds or fruit could hardly be trans­ ported by any other means ; and Alph. de Candolle has shown that such plants generally have restricted ranges. But seeds may be occasionally trans­ ported in another manner. Drift timber is thrown up on most islands, even on those in the midst of the wildest oceans ; and the natives of the coral islands in the Pacific procure stones for their tools solely from the roots of drifted trees, these stones being a valuable royal tax. I find on examination that, when irregularly-shaped stones are embedded in the roots of trees, small parcels of earth are very frequently enclosed in their interstices and behind them—so perfectly that not a particle could be washed away in the longest transport : out of one small portion of earth thus com­ pletely enclosed by wood in an oak about 50 years old three dicotyledonous plants germinated. I am certain of the accuracy of this observation. Again, I can show that the carcasses of birds, when floating on the sea, sometimes escape being im­ mediately devoured ; and seeds of many kinds in the crops of floating birds long retain their vitality. Peas and vetches, for instance, are killed by even a few days’ immersion in sea-water; but some taken out of the crop of a pigeon which had floated on artificial salt water for 30 days to my surprise nearly all germinated. Living birds can hardly fail to be highly effective agents in the transportation of seeds. I could give many facts showing how frequently birds of many kinds are blown by gales to vast distances across the ocean. We may, I think, safely assume that under such circumstances their rate of flight would often be 35 miles an hour ; and some authors have given a far higher estimate. I have never seen an instance of nutritious seeds passing through the intestines of a bird; but hard seeds of fruit pass uninjured through even the digestive organs of a turkey. In the course of two months I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds out of the excre­ ment of small birds, and these seemed perfect, and some of them which I tried germinated. But the following fact is more important: the crops of birds do not secrete gastric juice, and do not in the least injure, as I know by trial, the germi­ nation of seeds. Now, after a bird has found and devoured a large supply of food, it is positively asserted that all the grains dp not pass into the gizzard for twelve or even eighteen hours. A bird in this interval might easily be blown to the distance of 500 miles; and hawks are known to look out for tired birds, and the contents of their torn crops might thus readily get scattered. Mr. Brent informs me that a friend of his had to give up flying carrier-pigeons from France to England, as the hawks on the English coast destroyed so many on their arrival. Some hawks and owls bolt their prey whole, and after an interval of from twelve to twenty hours disgorge pellets which, as I know from experiments made in the Zoological Gardens, include seeds capable of germination. Some seeds of the oat, wheat, millet, canary, hemp, clover, and beet germinated after having been from twelve to twenty-one hours in the stomachs of different birds of prey; and two seeds of beet grew after having been thus retained for two days and fourteen hours. Fresh-water fish, I find, eat seeds of many land and water plants ; fish are frequently devoured by birds, and thus the seeds might be transported from place to place. I forced many kinds of seeds into the stomachs of dead fish, and then gave their bodies to fishing-eagles, storks, and pelicans ; these birds, after an interval of many hours, either rejected the seeds in pellets or passed them in their excrement; and several of these seeds retained their power of germination. Certain seeds, how­ ever, were always killed by this process. Although the beaks and feet of birds are generally quite clean, I can show that earth sometimes adheres to them; in one instance I removed twenty-two grains of argillaceous earth from one foot of a par­ tridge, and in this earth there was a pebble quite as large as the seed of a vetch. Thus seeds might occasionally be transported to great distances ; for many facts could be given showing that soil almost everywhere is charged with seeds. Reflect for a moment on the millions of quails which annually cross the Mediterranean; and can we doubt that the earth adhering to �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION their feet would sometimes include a few minute seeds ? But I shall presently have to recur to this subject. As icebergs are known to be some­ times loaded with earth and stones, and have even carried brushwood, bones, and the nest of a land-bird, I can hardly doubt that they must occasionally have trans­ ported seeds from one part to another of the arctic and antarctic regions, as sug­ gested by Lyell, and, during the Glacial period, from one part of the now temperate regions to another. In the Azores, from the large number of the species of plants common to Europe, in comparison with the plants of other oceanic islands nearer to the mainland, and (as remarked by Mr. H. C. Watson) from the somewhat northern character of the flora in comparison with the latitude, I suspected that these islands had been partly stocked by ice-borne seeds during the Glacial epoch. At my request, Sir C. Lyell wrote to M. Hartung to inquire whether he had observed erratic boulders on these islands, and he answered that he had found large fragments of granite and other rocks which do not occur in the archipelago. Hence we may safely infer that icebergs formerly landed their rocky burthens on the shores of these mid­ ocean islands, and it is at least possible that they may have brought thither the seeds of northern plants. Considering that the several above means of transport, and that several other means, which without doubt remain to be discovered, have been in action year after year, for centuries and tens of thousands of years, it would, I think, be a marvellous fact if many plants had not thus become widely transported. These means of transport are sometimes called accidental, but this is not strictly correct: the currents of the sea are not accidental, nor is the direction of prevalent gales of wind. It should be observed that scarcely any means of transport would carry seed for very great distances, for seeds do not retain their vitality when exposed for a great length of time to the action of sea-water, nor could they be long carried in the crops or intestines of birds. These means, how­ ever, would suffice for occasional transport across tracts of sea some hundred miles in breadth, or from island to island, or from a continent to a neighbouring island, but not from one distant continent to another. The floras of distant continents would not by such means become mingled in any great degree, but would remain as distinct 147 as we now see them to be. The currents, from their course, would never bring seeds from North America to Britain, though they might and do bring seeds from the West Indies to our western shores, where, if not killed by so long an immersion in salt water, they could not endure our climate. Almost every year one or two land-birds are blown across the whole Atlantic Ocean, from North America to the western shores of Ireland and England; but seeds could be transported by these wanderers only by one means—namely, in dirt sticking to their feet, which is in itself a rare accident. Even in this case, how small would be the chance of a seed falling on favourable soil, and coming to maturity 1 But it would be a great error to argue that because a well-stocked island, like Great Britain, has not, as far as is known (and it would be very difficult to prove this), received within the last few centuries, through occasional means of transport, immigrants from Europe or any other continent, that a poorly-stocked island, though standing more remote from the mainland, would not receive colonists by similar means. I do not doubt that out of twenty seeds or animals transported to an island, even if far less well stocked than Britain, scarcely more than one would be so well fitted to its new home as to become naturalised. But this, as it seems to me, is no valid argument against what would be effected by occasional means of trans­ port, during the long lapse of geological time, while an island was being upheaved and formed, and before it had become fully stocked with inhabitants. On almost bare land, with few or no destructive insects or birds living there, nearly every seed which chanced to arrive, if fitted for the climate, would be sure to geiminate and survive. Dispersal during the Glacial period.— The identity of many plants and animals on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where the Alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points, without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one to the other. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact to see so many of the same plants living on the snowy regions of the Alps or Pyrenees and in the extreme northern parts of Europe; but it is far more remarkable that the plants on the White Mountains, in the United States of America, are all �148 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES the same with those of Labrador, and nearly all the same, as we hear from Asa Gray, with those on the loftiest mountains of Europe. Even as long ago as 1747 such facts led Gmelin to conclude that the same species must have been independently created at several distinct points ; and we might have remained in this same belief had not Agassiz and others called vivid attention to the Glacial period, which, as we shall immediately see, affords a simple explanation of these facts. We have evidence of almost every conceivable kind, organic and inorganic, that within a very recent geological period central Europe and North America suffered under an Arctic climate. The ruins of a house by fire do not tell their tale more plainly than do the mountains of Scotland and Wales, with their scored flanks, polished surfaces, and perched boulders, of the icy streams with which their valleys were lately filled. So greatly has the climate of Europe changed that in Northern Italy gigantic moraines left by old glaciers are now clothed by the vine and maize. Through­ out a large part of the United States, erratic boulders and rocks, scored by drifted ice­ bergs and coast-ice, plainly reveal a former cold period. The former influence of the glacial climate on the distribution of the inhabi­ tants of Europe, as explained with remark­ able clearness by Edward Forbes, is substantially as follows. But we shall follow the changes more readily by sup­ posing a new Glacial period to come slowly on, and then pass away, as formerly occur­ red. As the cold came on, and as each more southern zone became fitted for arctic beings and ill-fitted for their former more temperate inhabitants, the latter would be supplanted, and arctic productions would take their places. The inhabitants of the more temperate regions would at the same time travel southward, unless they were stopped by barriers, in which case they would perish. The mountains would be­ come covered with snow and ice, and their former Alpine inhabitants would descend to the plains. By the time that the cold had reached its maximum we should have a uniform arctic fauna and flora covering the central parts of Europe as far south as the Alps and Pyrenees, and even stretching into Spain. The now temperate regions of the United States would likewise be covered by arctic plants and animals, and these would be nearly the same with those of Europe; for the present circumpolar inhabitants, which we suppose to have everywhere travelled southward, are re­ markably uniform round the world. We may suppose that the Glacial period came on a little earlier or later in North America than in Europe, so will the southern migra­ tion there have been a little earlier or later; but this will make no difference in the final result. As the warmth returned, the arctic forms would retreat northward, closely followed up in their retreat by the produc­ tions of the more temperate regions. And as the snow melted from the bases of the mountains, the arctic forms would seize on the cleared and thawed ground, always ascending higher and higher as the warmth increased, while their brethren were pur­ suing their northern journey. Hence, when the warmth had fully returned, the same arctic species which had lately lived in a body together on the lowlands of the Old and New Worlds would be left isolated on distant mountain-summits (having been exterminated on all lesser heights) and in the arctic regions of both hemispheres. Thus we can understand the identity of many plants at points so immensely remote as on the mountains of the United States and of Europe. We can thus also under­ stand the fact that the Alpine plants of each mountain-range are more especially related to the arctic forms living due north or nearly due north of them ; for the migra­ tion as the cold came on, and the re-migration on the returning warmth, will generally have been due south and north. The Alpine plants, for example, of Scotland, as remarked by Mr. H. C. Watson, and those of the Pyrenees, as remarked by Ramond, are more especially allied to the plants of northern Scandinavia; those of the United States to Labrador; those of the mountains of Siberia to the arctic regions of that country. These views, grounded as they are on the perfectly well-ascertained occur­ rence of a former Glacial period, seem to me to explain in so satisfactory a manner the present distribution of the alpine and arctic productions of Europe and America, that, when in other regions we find the same species on distant mountain-summits, we may almost conclude, without other evi­ dence, that a colder climate permitted their former migration across the low intervening tracts, since become too warm for their existence. If the climate, since the Glacial period, has ever been in any degree warmer than at present (as some geologists in the �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION United States believe to have been the case, chiefly from the distribution of the fossil Gnathodon), then the arctic and temperate productions will at a very late period have marched a little further north, and subsequently have retreated to their present homes; but I have met with no satisfactory evidence with respect to this intercalated slightly warmer period since the Glacial period. The arctic forms, during their long southern migration and re-migration north­ ward, will have been exposed to nearly the same climate, and, as is especially to be noticed, they will have kept in a body together ; consequently, their mutual rela­ tions will not have been much disturbed, and, in accordance with the principles in­ culcated in this volume, they will not have been liable to much modification. But with our alpine productions, left isolated from the moment of the returning warmth, first at the bases and ultimately on the summits of the mountains, the case will have been somewhat different; for it is not likely that all the same arctic species will have been left on mountain-ranges distant from each other, and have survived there ever since ; they will also, in all probability, have become mingled with ancient alpine species which must have existed on the mountains before the commencement of the Glacial epoch, and which during its coldest period will have been temporarily driven down to the plains ; they will also have been exposed to somewhat different climatal influences. Their mutual relations will thus have been in some degree dis­ turbed ; consequently, they will have been liable to modification, and this we find has been the case ; for, if we compare the present alpine plants and animals of the several great European mountain-ranges, though very many of the species are identi­ cally the same, some present varieties, some are ranked as doubtful forms, and some few are distinct yet closely-allied or representative species. In illustrating what, as I believe, actually took place during the Glacial period, I assumed that at its commencement the arctic productions were as uniform round the polar regions as they are at the present day. But the foregoing remarks on dis­ tribution apply not only to strictly arctic forms, but also to many sub-arctic and to some few northern temperate forms, for some of these are the same on the lower mountains and on the plains of North America and Europe; and it may be 149 reasonably asked how I account for the necessary degree of uniformity of the sub­ arctic and northern temperate forms round the world at the commencement of the Glacial period. At the present day the sub-arctic and northern temperate produc­ tions of the Old and New Worlds are separated from each other by the Atlantic Ocean and by the extreme northern part of the Pacific. During the Glacial period, when the inhabitants of the Old and New Worlds lived further southwards than at present, they must have been still more completely separated by wider spaces of ocean. I believe the above difficulty may be surmounted by looking to still earlier changes of climate of an opposite nature. We have good reason to believe that during the newer Pliocene period, before the Glacial epoch, and while the majority of the inhabitants of the world were speci­ fically the same as now, the climate was warmer than at the present day. Hence we may suppose that the organisms now living under the climate of latitude 6o°, during the Pliocene period lived further north under the Polar Circle, in latitude 66°-67°; and that the strictly arctic pro­ ductions then lived on the broken land still nearer to the pole. Now, if we look at a globe, we shall see that under the Polar Circle there is almost continuous land from western Europe, through Siberia, to eastern America. And to the continuity of the circumpolar land, and to the conse­ quent freedom for intermigration under a more favourable climate, I attribute the necessary amount of uniformity in the sub­ arctic and northern temperate productions of the Old and New Worlds at a period anterior to the Glacial epoch. Believing, from reasons before alluded to, that our continents have long remained in nearly the same relative position, though subjected to large, but partial, oscillations of level, I am strongly inclined to extend the above view, and to infer that during some earlier and still warmer period, such as the older Pliocene period, a large number of the same plants and animals inhabited the almost continuous circumpolar land ; and that these plants and animals, both in the Old and New Worlds, began slowly to migrate southwards as the climate became less warm, long before the commencement of the Glacial period. We now see, as I believe, their descendants, mostly in a modified condition, in the central parts of Europe and the United States. On this view we can understand the relationship, �150 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES with very little identity, between the pro­ ductions of North America and Europe— a relationship which is most remarkable considering the distance of the two areas and their separation by the Atlantic Ocean. We can further understand the singular fact, remarked on by several observers, that the productions of Europe and America during the later tertiary stages were more closely related to each other than they are at the present time; for during these warmer periods the northern parts of the Old and New Worlds will have been almost continuously united by land, serving as a bridge, since rendered impassable by cold, for the intermigration of their inhabitants. During the slowly-decreasing warmth of the Pliocene period, as soon as the species in common which inhabited the New and Old Worlds migrated south of the Polar Circle, they must have been completely cut off from each other. This separation, as far as the more temperate productions are concerned, took place long ages ago. And as the plants and animals migrated southward, they will have become mingled in the one great region with the native American productions, and have had to compete with them ; and, in the other great region, with those of the Old World. Con­ sequently, we have here everything favour­ able for much modification—for far more modification than with the Alpine produc­ tions, left isolated within a much more recent period, on the several mountain­ ranges and on the arctic lands of the two Worlds. Hence it has come that, when we compare the now living productions of the temperate regions of the New and Old Worlds, we find very few identical species (though Asa Gray has lately shown that more plants are identical than was formerly supposed), but we find in every great class many forms which some naturalists rank as geographical races and others as distinct species, and a host of closely-allied or representative forms which are ranked by all naturalists as specifically distinct. As on the land, so in the waters of the sea, a slow southern migration of a marine fauna, which during the Pliocene or even a somewhat earlier period was nearly uniform along the continuous shores of the Polar Circle, will account, on the theory of modification, for many closed-allied forms now living in areas completely sundered. Thus, I think, we can understand the presence of many existing and tertiary representative forms on the eastern and western shores of temperate North America; and the still more striking case of many closely-allied crustaceans (as described in Dana’s admirable work), of some fish and other marine animals, in the Mediterranean and in the seas of Japan—areas now sepa­ rated by a continent and by nearly a hemi­ sphere of equatorial ocean. These cases of relationship, without identity, of the inhabitants of seas now disjoined, and likewise of the past and present inhabitants of the temperate lands of North America and Europe, are inexpli­ cable on the theory of creation. We cannot say that they have been created alike, in correspondence with the nearly similar physical conditions of the areas ; for if we compare, for instance, certain parts of South America with the southern continents of the Old World, we see countries closely corresponding in all their physical con­ ditions, but with their inhabitants utterly dissimilar. But we must return to our more imme­ diate subject, the Glacial period. I am convinced that Forbes’s view may be largely extended. In Europe we have the plainest evidence of the cold period, from the western shores of Britain to the Oural range, and southward to the Pyrenees. We may infer from the frozen mammals and nature of the mountain vegetation that Siberia was similarly affected. Along the Himalaya, at points 900 miles apart, glaciers have left the marks of their former low descent; and in Sikkim Dr. Hooker saw maize growing on giganticancient moraines. South of the equator we have some direct evidence of former glacial action in New Zealand ; and the same plants, found on widely-separated mountains in that island, tell the same story. If one account which has been published can be trusted, we have direct evidence of glacial action in the south­ eastern corner of Australia. Looking to America : in the northern half, ice-borne fragments of rock have been observed on the eastern side as far south as latitude 36°-37°, and on the shores of the Pacific, where the climate is now so different, as far south as latitude 46°; erratic boulders have also been noticed on the Rocky Mountains. In the Cordillera of Equatorial South America glaciers once extended far below their present level. In central Chili I was astonished at the struc­ ture of a vast mound of detritus, about 800 feet in height, crossing a valley of the Andes ; and this, I now feel convinced, was a gigantic moraine, left far below any exist­ ing glacier. Further south on both sides �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION of the continent, from latitude 410 to the southernmost extremity, we have the clearest evidence of former glacial action in huge boulders transported far from their parent souice. We do not know that the Glacial epoch was strictly simultaneous at these several far distant points on opposite sides of the world. But we have good evidence in almost every case that the epoch was in­ cluded within the latest geological period. We have also excellent evidence that it endured for an enormous time, as measured by years, at each point. The cold may have come on, or have ceased, earlier at one point of the globe than at another, but seeing that it endured for long at each, and that it was contemporaneous in a geological sense, it seems to me probable that it was, during a part at least of the period, actually simultaneous throughout the world. With­ out some distinct evidence to the contrary, we may at least admit as probable that the glacial action was simultaneous on the eastern and western sides of North America, in the Cordillera under the equator and under the warmer temperate zones, and on both sides of the southern extremity of the continent. If this be admitted, it is difficult to avoid believing that the temperature of the whole world was at this period simul­ taneously cooler. But it would suffice for my purpose if the temperature was at the same time lower along certain broad belts of longitude. On this view of the whole world, or at least of broad longitudinal belts, having been simultaneously colder from pole to pole, much light can be thrown on the present distribution of identical and allied species. In America Dr. Hooker has shown that between forty and fifty of the flowering plants of Tierra del Fuego, form­ ing no inconsiderable part of its scanty flora, are common to Europe, enormously remote as these two points are ; and there are many closely-allied species. On the lofty mountains of equatorial America a host of peculiar species belonging to European genera occur. On the highest mountains of Brazil some few European genera were found by Gardner which do not exist in the wide intervening hot countries. So on the Silla of Caraccas the illustrious Humboldt long ago found species belonging to genera characteristic of the Cordillera. On the mountains of Abyssinia several European forms and some few re­ presentatives of the peculiar flora of the Cape of Good Hope occur. At the Cape 151 of Good Hope a very few European species, believed not to have been introduced by man, and on the mountains some few representative European forms, are found which have not been discovered in the intertropical parts of Africa. On the Himalaya and on the isolated mountain-ranges of the peninsula of India, on the heights of Ceylon, and on the volcanic cones of Java, many plants occur either identically the same or representing each other, and at the same time representing plants of Europe, not found in the intervening hot lowlands. A list of the genera collected on the loftier peaks of Java raises a picture of a collec­ tion made on a hill in Europe ! Still more striking is the fact that southern Australian forms are clearly represented by plants growing on the summits of the mountains of Borneo. Some of these Australian forms, as I hear from Dr. Hooker, extend along the heights of the peninsula of Malacca, and are thinly scattered, on the one hand, over India and, on the other, as far north as Japan. On the southern mountains of Australia Dr. F. Muller has discovered several European species ; other species, not intro­ duced by man, occur on the lowlands ; and a long list can be given, as I am informed by Dr. Hooker, of European genera found in Australia, but not in the intermediate torrid regions. In the admirable Introduc­ tion to the Flora of New Zealand, by Dr. Hooker, analogous and striking facts are given in regard to the plants of that large island. Hence we see that throughout the world the plants growing on the more lofty mountains, and on the temperate lowlands of the northern and southern hemispheres, are sometimes identically the same; but they are much oftener specifically distinct, though related to each other in a most remarkable manner. This brief abstract applies to plants alone : some strictly analogous facts could be given on the distribution of terrestrial animals. In marine productions similar cases occur ; as an example, I may quote a remark by the highest authority, Professor Dana, that “ it is certainly a wonderful fact that New Zealand should have a closer resemblance in its Crustacea to Great Britain, ‘its antipode, than to any other part of the world.” Sir J. Richardson also speaks of the reappearance on the shores of New Zealand, Tasmania, etc., of northern forms of fish. Dr. Hooker informs me that twenty-five species of Algae are common to New Zealand and to Europe, but have not �152 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES been found in the intermediate tropical seas. It should be observed that the northern species and forms found in the southern parts of the southern hemisphere, and on the mountain-ranges of the intertropical regions, are not arctic, but belong to the northern temperate zones. As Mr. H. C. Watson has recently remarked : “In receding from polar towards equatorial latitudes, the alpine or mountain floras really become less and less arctic.” Many of the forms living on the mountains of the warmer regions of the earth and in the southern hemisphere are of doubtful value, being ranked by some naturalists as speci­ fically distinct, by others as varieties ; but some are certainly identical, and many, though closely related to northern forms, must be ranked as distinct species. Now, let us see what light can be thrown on the foregoing facts on the belief, sup­ ported as it is by a large body of geological evidence, that the whole world, or a large part of it, was, during the Glacial period, simultaneously much colder than at present. The Glacial period, as measured by years, must have been very long ; and when we remember over what vast spaces some naturalised plants and animals have spread within a few centuries, this period will have been ample for any amount of migration. As the cold came slowly on, all the tropical plants and other productions will have retreated from both sides towards the equator, followed in the rear by the tem­ perate productions, and these by the arctic; but with the latter we are not now con­ cerned. The tropical plants probably suffered much extinction—how much no one can say ; perhaps formerly the tropics supported as many species as we see at the present day crowded together at the Cape of Good Hope and in parts of tem­ perate Australia. As we know that many tropical plants and animals can withstand a considerable amount of cold, many might have escaped extermination during a moderate fall of temperature, more espe­ cially by escaping into the lowest, most protected, and warmest districts. But the great fact to bear in mind is that all tropical productions will have suffered to a certain extent. On the other hand, the temperate productions, after migrating nearer to the equator, though they will have been placed under somewhat new conditions, will have suffered less. And it is certain that many temperate plants, if protected from the inroads of competitors, can withstand a much warmer climate than their own. Hence it seems to me possible, bearing in mind that the tropical productions were in a suffering state, and could not have presented a firm front against intruders, that a certain number of the more vigorous and dominant temperate forms might have penetrated the native ranks, and have reached or even crossed the equator. The invasion would, of course, have been greatly favoured by high land, and perhaps by a dry climate; for Dr. Falconer informs me that it is the damp with the heat of the tropics which is so destructive to perennial plants from a temperate climate. On the other hand, the most humid and hottest districts will have afforded an asylum to the tropical natives. The mountain-ranges north-west of the Himalaya and the long line of the Cordillera seem to have afforded two great lines of invasion ; and it is a striking fact, lately communicated to me by Dr. Hooker, that all the flowering plants, about forty-six in number, common to Tierra del Fuego and to Europe, still exist in North America, which must have lain on the line of march. But I do not doubt that some temperate productions entered and crossed even the lowlands of the tropics at the period when the cold was most intense—when arctic forms had migrated some twenty-five degrees of lati­ tude from their native country and covered the land at the foot of the Pyrenees. At this period of extreme cold I believe that the climate under the equator at the level of the sea was about the same with that now felt there at the height of six or seven thousand feet. During this the coldest period, I suppose that large spaces of the tropical lowlands were clothed with a mingled tropical and temperate vegetation, like that now growing with strange luxu­ riance at the base of the Himalaya, as graphically described by Hooker. Thus, as I believe, a considerable num­ ber of plants, a few terrestrial animals, and some marine productions migrated during the Glacial period from the northern and southern temperate zones into the inter­ tropical regions, and some even crossed the equator. As the warmth returned, these temperate forms would naturally ascend the higher mountains, being exter­ minated on the lowlands; those which had not reached the equator would re­ migrate northward or southward towards their former homes ; but the forms, chiefly northern, which had crossed the equator would travel still further from their homes �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION into the more temperate latitudes of the opposite hemisphere. Although we have reason to believe from geological evidence that the whole body of arctic shells under­ went scarcely any modification during their long southern migration and re-migration northward, the case may have been wholly different with those intruding forms which settled themselves on the intertropical mountains and in the southern hemisphere. These, being surrounded by strangers, will have had to compete with many new forms of life ; and it is probable that selected modifications in their structure, habits, and constitutions will have profited them. Thus many of these wanderers, though still plainly related by inheritance to their brethren of the northern or southern hemi­ spheres, now exist in their new homes as well-marked varieties or as distinct species. It is a remarkable fact, strongly insisted on by Hooker in regard to America, and by Alph. de Candolle in regard to Aus­ tralia, that many more identical plants and allied forms have apparently migrated from the north to the south than in a reversed direction. We see, however, a few southern vegetable forms on the mountains of Borneo and Abyssinia. I suspect that this prepon­ derant migration from north to south js due to the greater extent of land in the north, and to the northern forms having existed in their own homes in greater numbers, and having, consequently, been advanced through natural selection and competition to a higher stage of perfection or dominating power than the southern forms. And thus, when they became com­ mingled during the Glacial period, the northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms. Just in the same manner as we see at the present day that very many European productions cover the ground in La Plata, and in a lesser degree in Australia, and have to a certain extent beaten the natives ; whereas extremely few southern forms have become naturalised in any part of Europe, though hides, wool, and other objects likely to carry seeds have been largely imported into Europe during the last two or three centuries from La Plata, and during the last thirty or forty years from Australia. Something of the same kind must have occurred on the intertropical mountains : no doubt before the Glacial period they were stocked with endemic Alpine forms ; but these have almost everywhere largely yielded to the more dominant forms, gene­ rated in the larger areas and more efficient 153 workshops of the north. In many islands the native productions are nearly equalled or even outnumbered by the naturalised ; and if the natives have not been actually exterminated, their numbers have been greatly reduced, and this is the first stage towards extinction. A mountain is an island on the land, and the intertropical mountains before the Glacial period must have been completely isolated ; and I believe that the productions of these islands on the land yielded to those produced within the larger areas of the north, just in the same way as the productions of real islands have everywhere lately yielded to continental forms, naturalised by man’s agency. I am far from supposing that all diffi­ culties are removed on the view here given in regard to the range and affinities of the allied species which live in the northern and southern temperate zones and on the mountains of the intertropical regions. Very many difficulties remain to be solved. I do not pretend to indicate the exact lines and means of migration, or the reason why certain species and not others have migra­ ted—why certain species have been modi­ fied and have given rise to new groups of forms, and others have remained unaltered. We cannot hope to explain such facts, until we can say why one species and not another becomes naturalised by man’s agency in a foreign land ; why one ranges twice or thrice as far, and is twice or thrice as common, as another species within their own homes. I have said that many difficulties remain to be solved: some of the most remarkable are stated with admirable clearness by Dr. Hooker in his botanical works on the ant­ arctic regions. These cannot be here dis­ cussed. I will only say that as far as regards the occurrence of identical species at points soenormouslyremote as Kerguelen Land, New Zealand, and Fuegia, I believe that towards the close of the Glacial period icebergs, as suggested by Lyell, have been largely concerned in their dispersal. But the existence of several quite distinct species, belonging to genera exclusively confined to the south, at these and other distant points of the southern hemisphere, is, on my theory of descent with modifica­ tion, a far more remarkable case of diffi­ culty. For some of these species are so distinct that we cannot suppose that there has been time since the commencement of the Glacial period for their migration, and for their subsequent modification to the �154 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES necessary degree. The facts seem to ine to indicate that peculiar and very distinct species have migrated in radiating lines from some common centre ; and I am inclined to look in the southern as in the northern hemisphere, to a former and warmer period, before the commencement of the Glacial period, when the antarctic lands, now covered with ice, supported a highly peculiar and isolated flora. I sus­ pect that before this flora was exterminated by the Glacial epoch a few forms were widely dispersed to various points of the southern hemisphere by occasional means of transport, and by the aid, as haltingplaces, of existing and now sunken islands. By these means, as I believe, the southern shores of America, Australia, New Zealand, have become slightly tinted by the same peculiar forms of vegetable life. Sir C. Lyell, in a striking passage, has speculated, in language almost identical with mine, on'the effects of great alterna­ tions of climate on geological distribution. I believe that the world has recently felt one of his great cycles of change ; and that on this view, combined with modifica­ tion through natural selection, a multitude of facts in the present distribution, both of the same and of allied forms of life, can be explained. The living waters may be said to have flowed during one short period from the north and from the south, and to have crossed at the equator, but to have flowed with greater force from the north, so as to have freely inundated the south. As the tide leaves its drift in horizontal lines, though rising higher on the shores where the tide rises highest, so have the living waters left their living drift on our moun­ tain-summits in a line gently rising from the arctic lowlands to a great height under the equator. The various beings thus left stranded may be compared with savage races of man, driven up and surviving in the mountain-fastnesses of almost every land, which serve as a record, full of interest to us, of the former inhabitants of the surrounding lowlands. Chapter XII. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION—Continued Distribution of fresh-water productions—On the inhabitants of oceanic islands—Absence of Batrachians and of terrestrial Mammals—On the relation of the inhabitants of islands to those of the nearest mainland—On colonisa­ tion from the nearest source with subsequent modification — Summary of the last and present chapters. As lakes and river-systems are separated from each other by barriers of land, it might have been thought that fresh-water productions would not have ranged widely within the same country, and, as the sea is apparently a still more impassable barrier, that they never would have extended to distant countries. But the case is exactly the reverse. Not only have many fresh­ water species, belonging to quite different classes, an enormous range, but allied species prevail in a remarkable manner throughout the world. I well repierriber. when first collecting in the fresh waters of Brazil, feeling much surprise at the simi­ larity of the fresh-water insects, shells, etc., and at the dissimilarity of the surrounding terrestrial beings, compared with those of Britain. But this power in fresh-water productions of ranging widely, though so unexpected, can, I think, in most cases be explained by their having become fitted, in a manner highly useful to them, for short and fre­ quent migrations from pond to pond, or from stream to stream ; and liability to wide dispersal would follow from this capacity as an almost necessary conse­ quence. We can here consider only a few cases. In regard to fish, I believe that the same species never occur in the fresh waters of distant continents. But on the same continent the species often range widely and almost capriciously; for two river-systems will have some fisft ip common �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 155 and some different. A few facts seem to duck-weed from one aquarium to another, favour the possibility of their occasional that I have quite unintentionally stocked transport by accidental means—like that the one with fresh-water shells from the of the live fish not rarely dropped by whirl­ other. But another agency is perhaps more winds in India, and the vitality of their ova effectual : I suspended a duck’s feet, which when removed from the water. But I am might represent those of a bird sleeping in inclined to attribute the dispersal of fresh­ a natural pond, in an aquarium where water fish mainly to slight changes within many ova of fresh-water shells were hatch­ the recent period in the level of the land ing ; and I found that numbers of the having caused rivers to flow into each extremely minute and just-hatched shells other. Instances also could be given of this crawled on the feet and clung to them so having occurred during floods, without any firmly that, when taken out of the water, change of level. We have evidence in the they could not be jarred off, though at a loess of the Rhine of considerable changes somewhat more advanced age they would of level in the land within a very recent voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched geological period, and when the surface molluscs, though aquatic in their nature, was peopled by existing land and fresh­ survived on the duck’s feet, in damp air, water shells. The wide difference of the from twelve to twenty hours ; and in this fish on opposite sides of continuous moun­ length of time a duck or heron might fly at tain-ranges, which from an early period least six or seven hundred miles, and would must have parted river-systems and com­ be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet, if pletely prevented their inosculation, seems blown across sea to an oceanic island or to to lead to this same conclusion. With any other distant point. Sir Charles Lyell respect to allied fresh-water fish occurring also informs me that a Dyticus has been at very distant points of the world, no doubt caught with an Ancylus (a fresh-water shell there are many cases which cannot at like a limpet) firmly adhering to it ; and a present be explained; but some fresh-water water-beetle of the same family, a Colymfish belong to very ancient forms, and in betes, once flew on board the Beagle when such cases there will have been ample time forty-five miles distant from the nearest for great geographical changes, and conse­ land ; how much farther it might have quently time and means for much migra­ flown with a favouring gale no one can tell. tion. In the second place, salt-water fish With respect to plants, it has long been can with care be slowly accustomed to live known what enormous ranges many fresh­ in fresh water ; and, according to Valen­ water and even marsh species have, both ciennes, there is hardly a single group of over continents and to the most remote fishes confined exclusively to fresh water, » oceanic islands. This is strikingly shown, so that we may imagine that a marine as remarked by Alph. de Candolle, in large member of a fresh-water group might travel groups of terrestrial plants which have far along the shores of the sea, and subse­ only a very few aquatic members ; for quently become modified and adapted to these latter seem immediately to acquire, the fresh waters of a distant land. as if in consequence, a very wide range. Some species of fresh-water shells have I think favourable means of dispersal a very wide range, and allied species, which, explain this fact. I have before mentioned on my theory, are descended from a common that earth occasionally, though rarely, parent and must have proceeded from a adheres in some quantity to the feet and single source, prevail throughout the world. beaks of birds. Wading birds, which Their distribution at first perplexed me frequent the muddy edges of ponds, if much, as their ova are not likely to be suddenly flushed, would be the most likely transported by birds, and they are im­ to have muddy feet. Birds of this order, I mediately killed by sea-water, as are the can show, are the greatest wanderers, and adults. I could not even understand how are occasionally found on the most remote some naturalised species have rapidly and barren islands in the open ocean ; spread throughout the same country. But they would not be likely to alight on the two facts which I have observed—and no surface of the sea, so that the dirt would doubt many others remain to be observed not be washed off their feet; when making -—throw some light on this subject. When land, they would be sure to fly to their a duck suddenly emerges from a pond natural fresh-water haunts. I do not believe covered with duck-weed, I have twice seen that botanists are aware how charged the these little plants adhering to its back; and mud of ponds is with seeds. I have tried it has happened to me, in removing a little several little experiments, but will here give �T56 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES only the most striking case : I took, in February, three table-spoonfuls of mud from three different'points, beneath water, on the edge of a little pond; this mud when dry weighed only 6X ounces ; I kept it covered up in my study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grew ; the plants were of many kinds, and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup ! Considering these facts, I think it would be an inexplicable circumstance if water-birds did not transport the seeds of fresh-water plants to vast distances, and if, consequently, the range of these plants was not very great. The same agency may have come into play with the eggs of some of the smaller fresh-water animals. Other and unknown agencies probably have also played a part. I have stated that fresh-water fish eat some kinds of seeds, though they reject many other kinds after having swallowed them ; even small fish swallow seeds of moderate size, as of the yellow water-lily and Potamogeton. Herons and other birds, century after century, have gone on daily devouring fish ; they then take flight and go to other waters, or are blown across the sea ; and we have seen that seeds retain their power of germination, when rejected in pellets or in excrement, many hours afterwards. When I saw the great size of the seeds of that fine water-lily, the Nelumbium, and remembered Alph. de Candolle’s remarks on this plant, I thought that its distribu­ tion must remain quite inexplicable ; but Audubon states that he found the seeds of the great southern water-lily (probably, according to Dr. Hooker, the Nelumbium luteum) in a heron’s stomach ; although I do not know the fact, yet analogy makes me believe that a heron, flying to another pond and getting a hearty meal of fish, would probably reject from its stomach a pellet containing the seeds of the Nelum­ bium undigested, or the seeds might be dropped by the bird while feeding its young, in the same way as fish are known sometimes to be dropped. In considering these several means of distribution, it should be remembered that when a pond or stream is first formed, for instance, on a rising islet, it will be unoccu­ pied ; and a single seed or egg will have a good chance of succeeding. Although there will always be a struggle for life between the individuals of the species, however few, already occupying any pond, yet as the number of kinds is small com­ pared with those on the land, the competi­ tion will probably be less severe between aquatic than between terrestrial species ; consequently, an intruder from the waters of a foreign country would have a better chance of seizing on a place than in the case of terrestrial colonists. We should also remember that some, perhaps many, fresh-water productions are low in the scale of nature, and that we have reason to believe that such low beings change or become modified less quickly than the high ; and this will give longer time than the average for the migration of the same aquatic species. We should not forget the probability of many species having formerly ranged as continuously as fresh­ water productions ever can range over immense areas, and having subsequently become extinct in intermediate regions. But the wide distribution of fresh-water plants and of the lower animals, whether retaining the same identical form or in some degree modified, I believe mainly depends on the wide dispersal of their seeds and eggs by animals, more especially by fresh-water birds, which have large powers of flight, and naturally travel from one to another and often distant piece of water. Nature, like a careful gardener, thus takes her seeds from a bed of a par­ ticular nature, and drops them in another equally well fitted for them. On the Inhabitants of Oceanic Islands.— We now come to the last of the three classes of facts which I have selected as presenting the greatest amount of difficulty, on the view that all the individuals both of the same and of allied species have descended from a single parent; and therefore have all proceeded from a common birth-place, notwithstanding that in the course of time they have come to inhabit distant points of the globe. I have already stated that I cannot honestly admit Forbes’s view on continental exten­ sions, which, if legitimately followed out, would lead to the belief that within the recent period all existing islands have been nearly or quite joined to some continent. This view would remove many difficulties, but it would not, I think, explain all the facts in regard to insular productions. In the following remarks I shall not confine myself to the mere question of dispersal ; but shall consider some other facts which bear on the truth of the two theories of independent creation and of descent with modification. �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION The species of all kinds which inhabit oceanic islands are few in number com­ pared with those on equal continental areas : Alph. de Candolle admits this for plants, and Wollaston for insects. If we look to the large size and varied stations of New Zealand, extending over 780 miles of latitude, and compare its flowering plants, only 750 in number, with those on an equal area at the Cape of Good Hope or in Australia, we must, I think, admit that something quite independently of any dif­ ference in physical conditions has caused so great a difference in number. Even the uniform county of Cambridge has 847 plants, and the little island of Anglesey 764, but a few ferns and a few introduced plants are included in these numbers, and the comparison in some other respects is not quite fair. We have evidence that the barren island of Ascension aboriginally possessed under half a dozen flowering plants ; yet many have become naturalised on it, as they have on New Zealand and on every other oceanic island which can be named. In St. Helena there is reason to believe that the naturalised plants and animals have nearly or quite exterminated many native productions. He who admits the doctrine of the creation of each sepa­ rate species will have to admit that a sufficient number of the best adapted plants and animals have not been created on oceanic islands ; for man has uninten­ tionally stocked them from various sources far more fully and perfectly than has nature. Although in oceanic islands the number of kinds of inhabitants is scanty, the pro­ portion of endemic species (z>., those found nowhere else in the world) is often ex­ tremely large. If we compare, for instance, the number of the endemic land-shells in Madeira, or of the endemic birds in the Galapagos Archipelago, with the number found on any continent, and then compare the area of the islands with that of the continent, we shall see that this is true. This fact might have been expected on my theory, for, as already explained, species occasionally arriving after long intervals in a new and isolated district, and having to compete with new associates, will be eminently liable to modification, and will often produce groups of modified descen­ dants. But it by no means follows that, because in an island nearly all the species of one class are peculiar, those of another class, or of another section of the same class, are peculiar; and this difference 157 seems to depend partly on the species which do not become modified having immigrated with facility and in a body, so that their mutual relations have not been much disturbed; and partly on the frequent arrival of unmodified immigrants from the mother-country, and the consequent inter­ crossing with them. With respect to the effects of this intercrossing, it should be remembered that the offspring of such crosses would almost certainly gain in vigour; so that even an occasional cross would produce more effect than might at first have been anticipated. To give a few examples: in the Galapagos Islands nearly every land bird, but only two out of the eleven marine birds, are peculiar ; and it is obvious that marine birds could arrive at these islands more easily than land birds. Bermuda, on the other hand, which lies at about the same distance from North America as the Galapagos Islands do from South America, and which has a very peculiar soil, does not possess one endemic land bird ; and we know, from Mr. J. M. Jones’s admirable account of Bermuda, that very many North American birds, during their great annual migrations, visit either periodically or occasionally this island. Madeira does not possess one peculiar bird, and many European and African birds are almost every year blown there, as I am informed by Mr. E. V. Harcourt. So that these two islands of Bermuda and Madeira have been stocked by birds, which for long ages have struggled together in their former homes, and have become mutually adapted to each other; and when settled in their new homes, each kind will have been kept by the others to their proper places and habits, and will consequently have been little liable to modification. Any tendency to modification will also have been checked by intercrossing with the unmodi­ fied immigrants from the mother-country. Madeira, again, is inhabited by a wonder­ ful number of peculiar land-shells, whereas not one species of sea-shell is confined to its shores : now, though we do not know how sea-shells are dispersed, yet we can see that their eggs or larvae, perhaps attached to sea-weed or floating timber, or to the feet of wading-birds, might be trans­ ported far more easily than land-shells across three or four hundred miles of open sea. The different orders of insects in Madeira apparently present analogous facts. Oceanic islands are sometimes deficient in certain classes, and their places are �i5S ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES apparently occupied by the other inhabi­ tants ; in the Galapagos Islands reptiles, and in New Zealand gigantic wingless birds, take the place of mammals. In the plants of the Galapagos Islands Dr. Hooker has shown that the proportional numbers of the different orders are very different from what they are elsewhere. Such cases are generally accounted for by the physical conditions of the islands ; but this explanation seems to me not a little doubtful. Facility of immigration, I believe, has been at least as important as the nature of the conditions. Many remarkable little facts could be given with respect to the inhabitants of remote islands. For instance, in certain islands not tenanted by mammals some of the en­ demic plants have beautifully hooked seeds; yet few relations are more striking than the adaptation of hooked seeds for trans­ portal by the wool and fur of quadrupeds. This case presents no difficulty on my view, for a hooked seed might be transported to an island by some other means ; and the plant, then becoming slightly modified, but still retaining its hooked seeds, would form an endemic species, having as useless an appendage as any rudimentary organ •—for instance, as the shrivelled wings under the soldered elytra of many insular beetles. Again, islands often possess trees or bushes belonging to orders which elsewhere in­ clude only herbaceous species ; now trees, as Alph. de Candolle has shown, generally have, whatever the cause may be, confined ranges. Hence trees would be little likely to reach distant oceanic islands ; and an herbaceous plant, though it would have no chance of successfully competing in stature with a fully developed tree, when established on an island and having to compete with herbaceous plants alone, might readily gain an advantage by growing taller and taller and overtopping the other plants. If so, natural selection would often tend to add to the stature of herbaceous plants when growing on an oceanic island, to whatever order they belonged, and thus convert them first into bushes and ultimately into trees. With respect to the absence of whole orders on oceanic islands, Bory St. Vincent long ago remarked that Batrachians (frogs, toads, newts) have never been found on any of the many islands with which the great oceans are studded. I have taken pains. to verify this assertion, and I have found it strictly true. I have, however, been assured that a frog exists on the mountains of the great island of New Zealand ; but I suspect that this exception (if the information be correct) may be explained through glacial agency. This general absence of frogs, toads, and newts on so many oceanic islands cannot be accounted for by their physical conditions ; indeed, it seerris that islands are peculiarly well fitted for these animals ; for frogs have been introduced into Madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. But as these animals and their spawn are known to be imme­ diately killed by sea-water, on my view we can see that there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore why they do not exist on any oceanic island. But why, on the theory of creation, they should not have been created there, it would be very difficult to explain. Mammals offer another and similar case. I have carefully searched the oldest voyages, but have not finished my search ; as yet I have not found a single instance, free from doubt, of a terrestrial mammal (excluding domesticated animals kept by the natives) inhabiting an island situated above 300 miles from a continent or great continental island; and many islands situated at a much less distance are equally barren. The Falkland Islands, which are inhabited by a wolf-like fox, come nearest to an exception ; but this group cannot be con­ sidered as oceanic, as it lies on a bank connected with the mainland ; moreover, icebergs formerly brought boulders to its western shores, and they may have formerly transported foxes, as so frequently now happens in the arctic regions. Yet it cannot be said that small islands will not support small mammals, for they occur in many parts of the world on very small islands, if close to a continent; and hardly an island can be named on which our smaller quadrupeds have not become naturalised and greatly multiplied. It cannot be said, on the ordinary view of creation, that there has not been time for the creation of mammals ; many volcanic islands are sufficiently ancient, as shown by the stupendous degradation which they have suffered and by their tertiary strata. There has also been time for the produc­ tion of endemic species belonging to other classes ; and on continents it is thought that mammals appear and disappear at a quicker rate than other and lower animals. Though terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aerial mammals do occur on almost every island. New Zealand �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world : Norfolk Island, the Viti Archi­ pelago, the Bonin Islands, the Caroline and Marianne Archipelagoes, and Mauritius— all possess their peculiar bats. Why, it may be asked, Has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands ? On my view, this ques­ tion can easily be answered ; for no terres­ trial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across. Bats have been seen wandering by day far over the Atlantic Ocean ; and two North American species either regularly or occasionally visit Bermuda, at the dis­ tance of 600 miles from the mainland. I hear from Mr. Tomes, who has specially studied this family, that many of the same species have enormous ranges, and are found on continents and on far distant islands. Hence we have only to suppose that such wandering species have been modified through natural selection in their new homes in relation to their new position, and we can understand the presence of endemic bats on islands, with the absence of all terrestrial mammals. Besides the absence of terrestrial mam­ mals in relation to the remoteness of islands from continents, there is also a relation, to a certain extent independent of distance, between the depth of the sea separating an island from the neighbouring mainland and the presence in both of the same mammiferous species or of allied species in a more or less modified condition. Mr. Windsor Earl has made some striking observations on this head in regard to the great Malay Archipelago, which is traversed near Celebes by a space of deep ocean ; and this space separates two widely distinct mammalian faunas. On either side the islands are situated on moderately deep submarine banks, and they are inhabited by closely-allied or identical quadrupeds. No doubt some few anomalies occur in this great archipelago, and there is much diffi­ culty in forming a judgment in some cases owing to the probable naturalisation of certain mammals through man’s agency ; but we shall soon have much light thrown on the natural history of this archipelago by the admirable zeal and researches of Mr. Wallace. I have not as yet had time to follow up this subject in all other quarters of the world ; but as far as I have gone the relation generally holds good. We see Britain separated by a shallow channel from Europe, and the mammals are the same on both sides ; we meet with analogous facts 159 on many islands separated by similar chan­ nels from Australia. The West Indian Islands stand on a deeply submerged bank, nearly 1,000 fathoms in depth, and here we find American forms, but the species and even the genera are distinct. As the amount of modification in all cases depends to a certain degree on the lapse of time, and as during changes of level it is obvious that islands separated by shallow channels are more likely to have been continuously united within a recent period to the mainland than islands separated by deeper channels, we can understand the frequent relation between the depth of the sea and the degree of affinity of the mammalian inhabitants of islands with those of a neighbouring continent— an inexplicable relation on the view of independent acts of creation. All the foregoing remarks on the inhabi­ tants of oceanic islands—namely, the scarcity of kinds; the richness in endemic forms in particular classes or sections of classes; the absence of whole groups, as of batrachians, and of terrestrial mammals, notwithstanding the presence of aerial bats ; the singular proportions of certain orders of plants, herbaceous forms having been developed into trees, etc.—seem to me to accord better with the view of occasional means of transport having been largely efficient in the long course of time than with the view of all our oceanic islands having been formerly connected by con­ tinuous land with the nearest continent ; for on this latter view the migration would propably have been more complete ; and if modification be admitted, all the forms of life would have been more equally modified, in accordance with the paramount impor­ tance of the relation of organism to organ­ ism. I do not deny that there are many and grave difficulties in understanding how several of the inhabitants of the more remote islands, whether still retaining the same specific form or modified since their arrival, could have reached their present homes. But the probability of many islands having existed as halting-places, of which not a wreck now remains, must not be over­ looked. I will here give a single instance oi one of the cases of difficulty. Almost all oceanic islands, even the most isolated and smallest, are inhabited by land-shells, generally by endemic species, but sometimes by species found elsewhere. Dr. Aug. A. Gould has given several interesting cases in regard to the land-shells of the islands of the Pacific. Now, it is notorious that �i6o ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES land-shells are very easily killed by salt; their eggs, at least such as I have tried, sink in sea-water and are killed by it. Yet there must be, on my view, some unknown but highly efficient means for their trans­ portal. Would the just-hatched young occasionally crawl on and adhere to the feet of birds roosting on the ground, and thus get transported? It occurred to me that land-shells, when hibernating and having a membranous diaphragm over the mouth of the shell, might be floated in chinks of drifted timber across moderately wide arms of the sea. And I found that several species did in this state withstand uninjured an immersion in sea-water during seven days : one of these shells was the Helix pomatia, and after it had again hibernated I put it in sea-water for twenty days, and it perfectly recovered. As this species has a thick calcareous operculum, I removed it, and when it had formed a new membranous one, I immersed it for fourteen days in sea-water, and it recovered and crawled away ; but more experiments are wanted on this head. The most striking and important fact for us in regard to the inhabitants of islands is their affinity to those of the nearest mainland, without being actually the same species. Numerous instances could be given of this fact. I will give only one, that of the Galapagos Archipelago, situated under the equator, between 500 and 600 miles from the shores of South America. Here almost every product of the land and water bears the unmistakeable stamp of the American continent. There are twenty-six land-birds, and twenty-five of these are ranked by Mr. Gould as distinct species, supposed to have been created here; yet the close affinity of most of these birds to American species in every character, in their habits, gestures, and tones of voice, was manifest. So it is with the other animals, and with nearly all the plants, as shown by Dr. Hooker in his admirable memoir on the Flora of this archipelago. The naturalist, looking at the inhabitants of these volcanic islands in the Pacific, distant several hundred miles from the continent, yet feels that he is standing on American land. Why should this be so ? Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the con­ ditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast; in fact, there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. On the other hand, there is a considerable degree of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size of the islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archi­ pelagos ; but what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants! The inhabi­ tants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explana­ tion on the ordinary view of independent creation ; whereas, on the view here main­ tained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land, from America, and the Cape de Verde Islands from Africa ; and that such colonists would be liable to modification—the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace. Many analogous facts could be given ; indeed, it is an almost universal rule that the endemic productions of islands are related to those of the nearest continent, or of other near islands. The exceptions are few, and most of them can be explained. Thus the plants of Kerguelen Land, though standing nearer to Africa than to America, are related, and that very closely, as we know from Dr. Hooker’s account, to those of America; but on the view that this island has been mainly stocked by seeds brought with earth and stones on ice­ bergs, drifted by the prevailing currents, this anomaly disappears. New Zealand'in its endemic plants is much more closely related to Australia, the nearest mainland, than to any other region : and this is what might been expected ; but it is also plainly related to South America, which, although the next nearest continent, is so enormously remote that the fact becomes an anomaly. But this difficulty almost disappears on the view that both NewZealand, South America, and other southern lands were long ago partially stocked from a nearly intermediate though distant point—-namely, from the antarctic islands-—when they were clothed with vegetation, before the commencement of the Glacial period. The affinity, which, though feeble, I am assured by Dr. Hooker is real, between the flora of the south-western corner of Australia and of the Cape of Good �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION Hope, is a far more remarkable case, and is at present inexplicable ; but this affinity is confined to the plants, and will, I do not doubt, be some day explained. The law which causes the inhabitants of an archipelago, though specifically distinct, to be closely allied to those of the nearest continent we sometimes see displayed on a small scale, yet in a most interesting manner, within the limits of the same archipelago. Thus the several islands of the Galapagos Archipelago are tenanted, as I have elsewhere shown, in a quite mar­ vellous manner, by very closely-related species ; so that the inhabitants of each separate island, though mostly distinct, are related in an incomparably closer degree to each other than to the inhabitants of any other part of the world. And this is just what might have been expected on my view, for the islands are situated so near each other that they would almost certainly receive immigrants from the same original source, or from each other. But this dis­ similarity between the endemic inhabitants of the islands may be used as an argument against my views, for, it may be asked, how has it happened in the several islands situated within sight of each other, having the same geological nature, the same height, climate, etc., that many of the immigrants should have been differently modified, though only in a small degree ? This long appeared to me a great difficulty, but it arises in chief part from the deeply-seated error of con­ sidering the physical conditions of a country as the most important for its inhabitants ; whereas it cannot, I think, be disputed that the nature of the other inhabitants, with which each has to compete, is at least as important, and generally a far more impor­ tant, element of success. Now, if we look to those inhabitants of the Galapagos Archi­ pelago which are found in other parts of the world (laying on one side for the moment the endemic species, which cannot be here fairly included, as we are considering how they have come to be modified since their arrival), we find a considerable amount of difference in the several islands. This difference might indeed have been expected on the view of the islands having been stocked by occasional means of transport—a seed, for instance, of one plant having been brought to one island, and that of another plant to another island. Hence, when in former times an immigrant settled on any one or more of the islands, or when it subse­ quently spread from one island to another, it would undoubtedly be exposed to different conditions of life in the different islands, for it would have to compete with different sets of organisms. A plant, for instance, would find the best-fitted ground more perfectly occupied by distinct plants in one island than in another, and it would be exposed to the attacks of somewhat different enemies. If, then, it varied, natural selection would probably favour different varieties in the different islands. Some species, however, might spread and yet retain the same character throughout the group, just as we see on continents some species spreading widely and remaining the same. The really surprising fact in this case of the Galapagos Archipelago, and in a lesser degree in some analogous instances, is that the new species formed in the separate islands have not quickly spread to the other islands. But the islands, though in sight of each other, are separated by deep arms of the sea, in most cases wider than the British Channel, and there is no reason to suppose that they have at any former period been continuously united. The currents of the sea are rapid and sweep across the archipelago, and gales of wind are extra­ ordinarily rare ; so that the islands are far more effectually separated from each other than they appear to be on a map. Nevertheless, a good many species, both those found in other parts of the world and those confined to the archipelago, are common to the several islands, and we may infer from certain facts that these have probably spread from some one island to the others. But we often take, I think, an erroneous view of the probability of closelyallied species invading each other’s territory when put into free intercommunication. Undoubtedly, if one species has any advan­ tage whatever over another, it will in a very brief time wholly or in part supplant it ; but if both are equally well fitted for their own places in nature, both probably will hold their own places and keep separate for almost any length of time. Being familiar with the fact that many species, naturalised through man’s agency, have spread with astonishing rapidity over new countries, we are apt to infer that most species would thus spread; but we should remember that the forms which become naturalised in new countries are not generally closely allied to the aboriginal inhabitants, but are very distinct species, belonging in a large proportion of cases, as shown by Alph. de Candolle, to distinct genera. In the Gala­ pagos Archipelago many even of the birds, though so well adapted for flying from M �162 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES island to island, are distinct on each ; thus there are three closely-allied species of mocking-thrush, each confined to its own island. Now, let us suppose the mockingthrush of Chatham Island to be blown to Charles Island, which has its own mockingthrush : why should it succeed in estab­ lishing itself there? We may safely infer that Charles Island is well stocked with its own species, for annually more eggs are laid there than can possibly be reared ; and we may infer that the mocking-thrush peculiar to Charles Island is, at least, as well fitted for its home as is the species peculiar to Chatham Island. Sir C. Lyell and Mr. Wollaston have communicated to me a remarkable fact bearing on this subject—namely, that Madeira and the adjoining islet of. Porto Santo possess many distinct but representative land­ shells, some of which live in crevices of stone ; and although large quantities of stone are annually transported from Porto Santo to Madeira, yet this latter island has not become colonised by the Porto Santo species ; nevertheless, both islands have been colonised by some European land­ shells, which no doubt had some advantage over the indigenous species. From these considerations, I think we need not greatly marvel at the endemic and representative species, which inhabit the several islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, not having universally spread from island to island. In many other instances, as in the several districts of the same continent, pre-occupation has probably played an important part in checking the commingling of species under the same conditions of life. Thus the south-east and south-west corners of Australia have nearly the same physical conditions, and are united by continuous land, yet they are inhabited by a vast number of distinct mammals, birds, and plants. The principle which determines the general character of the fauna and flora of oceanic islands—namely, that the inhabi­ tants, when not identically the same, yet are plainly related to the inhabitants of that region whence colonists could most readily have been derived—the_ colonists having been subsequently modified and better fitted to their new horpes—is of the widest application throughout nature. We see this on every mountain, in every lake and marsh. For alpine species, excepting in so far as the same forms, chiefly of plants, have spread widely throughout the world during the recent Glacial epoch, are related to those of the surrounding lowlands ; thus we have in South America alpine humming­ birds, alpine rodents, alpine plants, etc., all of strictly American forms, and it is obvious that a mountain, as it became slowly upheaved, would naturally be colonised from the surrounding lowlands. So it is with the inhabitants of lakes and marshes, excepting in so far as great facility of trans­ port has given the same general forms to the whole world. We see this same principle in the blind animals inhabiting the caves of America and of Europe. Other analogous facts could be given. And it will, I believe, be universally found to be true that wherever in two regions, let them be ever so distant, many closely-allied or representative species occur, there will like.wise be found some identical species, show­ ing, in accordance with the foregoing view, that at some former period there has been intercommunication or migration between the two regions. And wherever many closely-allied species occur, there will be found many forms which some naturalists rank as distinct species and some as varie­ ties, these doubtful forms showing us the steps in the process of modification. This relation between the power and extent of migration of a species, either at the present time or at some former period under different physical conditions, and the existence at remote points of the world of other species allied to it, is shown in another and more general way. Mr. Gould remarked to me long ago that in those genera of birds which range over the world many of the species have very wide ranges. I can hardly doubt that this rule is generally true, though it would be difficult to prove it. Among mammals, we see it strikingly displayed in Bats, and in a lesser degree in the Felidse and Canidas. We see it if we compare the distribution of butterflies and beetles. So it is with most fresh-water pro­ ductions, in which so many genera range over the world, and many individual species have enormous ranges. It is not meant that in world-ranging genera all th; species have a wide range, or even that they have on an average a wide range, but only that some of the species range very widely; for the facility with which widely-ranging species vary and give rise to new forms will largely determine their average range. For instance, two varieties of the same species inhabit America and Europe, and the species thus has an immense range ; but, if the variation had been a little greater, the two varieties would have been ranked �GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION as distinct species, and the common range would have been greatly reduced. Still, less is it meant that a species which apparently has the capacity of crossing barriers and ranging widely, as in the case of certain powerfully-winged birds, will necessarily range widely; for we should never forget that to range widely implies, not only the power of crossing barriers, but the more important power of being victorious in distant lands in the struggle for life with foreign associates. But on the view of all the species of a genus having descended from a single parent, though now distributed to the most remote points of the world, we ought to find, and I believe as a general rule we do find, that some at least of the species range very widely; for it is necessary that the unmodified parent should range widely, undergoing modification during its diffusion, and should place itself under divers conditions favourable for the con­ version of its offspring, firstly into new varieties, and ultimately into new species. In considering the wide distribution of certain genera, we should bear in mind that some are extremely ancient, and must have branched off from a common parent at a remote epoch ; so that in such cases there will have been ample time for great climatal and geographical changes and for accidents of transport, and, consequently, for the migration of some of the species into all quarters of the world, where they may have become slightly modified in relation to their new conditions. There is, also, some reason to believe, from geological evidence, that organisms low in the scale within each great class generally change at a slower rate than the higher forms ; and conse­ quently the lower forms will have had a better chance of ranging widely and of still retaining the same specific character. This fact, together with the seeds and eggs of many low forms being very minute and better fitted for distant transportation, pro­ bably accounts for a law which has long been observed, and which has lately been admirably discussed by Alph. de Candolle in regard to plants—namely, that the lower any group of organisms is, the more widely it is apt to range. The relations just discussed—namely, low and slowly-changing organisms ranging more widely than the high ; some of the species of widely-ranging genera themselves ranging widely ; such facts, as alpine, lacustrine, and marsh productions being related (with the exceptions before specified) to those on the surrounding low lands and 163 dry lands, though these stations are so different; the very close relation of the distinct species which inhabit the islets of the same archipelago ; and especially the striking relation of the inhabitants of each whole archipelago or island to those of the nearest mainland—are, I think, utterly inexplicable on the ordinary view of the independent creation of each species, but are explicable on the view of colonisa­ tion from the nearest or readiest source, together with the subsequent modification and better adaptation of the colonists to their new homes. Summary of last and present Chapters.— In these chapters I have endeavoured to show that, if we make due allowance for out ignorance of the full effects of all the changes of climate and of the level of the land which have certainly occurred within the recent period, and of other similar changes which may have occurred within the same period ; if we remember how profoundly ignorant we are with respect to the many and curious means of occasional transport, a subject which has hardly ever been properly experimentised on ; if we bear in mind how often a species may have ranged continuously over a wide area, and then have become extinct in the intermediate tracts—I think the difficulties in believing that all the individuals of the same species, wherever located, have descended from the same parents, are not insuperable. And we are led to this conclusion, which has been arrived at by many naturalists under the designation of single centres of creation, by some general considerations, more especially from the importance of barriers and from the analogical distribution of sub­ genera, genera, and families. With respect to the distinct species of the same genus, which on my theory must have spread from one parent-source, if we make the same allowances as before for our ignorance, and remember that some forms of life change most slowly, enormous periods of time being thus granted for their migration, I do not think that the difficulties are insuperable, though they often are in this case, and in that of the individuals of the same species, extremely great. As exemplifying the effects- of climatal changes on distribution, I have attempted to show how important has been the influence of the modern Glacial period, which I am fully convinced simultaneously affected the whole world, or at least great �164 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES meridional belts. As showing how diversi­ fied are the means of occasional transport, I have discussed at.some little length the means of dispersal of fresh-water produc­ tions. If the difficulties be not insuperable in admitting that in the long course of time the individuals of the same species, and likewise of allied species, have proceeded from some one source, then I think all the grand leading facts of geographical distri­ bution are explicable on the theory of migration (generally of the more dominant forms of life), together with subsequent modification and multiplication of new forms. We can thus understand the high importance of barriers whether of land or water, which separate our several zoological and botanical provinces. We can thus understand the localisation of sub-genera, genera, and families ; and how it is that under different latitudes—for instance, in South America—the inhabitants of the plains and mountains, of the forests, marshes, and deserts, are in so mysterious a manner linked together by affinity, and are like­ wise linked to the extinct beings which formerly inhabited the same continent. Bearing in mind that the mutual relation of organism to organism is of the highest importance, we can see why two areas having nearly the same physical conditions should often be inhabited by very different forms of life : for according to the length of time which has elapsed since new inhabi­ tants entered one region; according to the nature of the communication which allowed certain forms and not others to enter, either in greater or lesser numbers; according or not as those which entered happened to come in more or less direct competition with each other and with the aborigines ; and according as the immigrants were capable of varying more or less rapidly— there would ensue in different regions, independently of their physical conditions, infinitely diversified conditions of life; there would be an almost endless amount of organic action and reaction ; and we should find, as we do find, some groups of beings greatly and some only slightly modified—some developed in great force, some existing in scanty numbers—in the different great geographical provinces of the world. On these same principles, we can under­ stand, as I have endeavoured to show, why oceanic islands should have few inhabitants, but of these a great number should be endemic or peculiar; and why, in relation to the means of migration, one group of beings, even within the same, class, should have all its species endemic, and another group should have all its species common to other quarters of the world. We can see why whole groups of organisms, as batrachians and terrestrial mammals, should be absent from oceanic islands, while the most isolated islands possess their own peculiar species of aerial mammals or bats. We can see why there should be some relation between the presence of mammals, in a more or less modified condition, and the depth of the sea between an island and the mainland. We can clearly see why all the inhabitants of an archipelago, though specifically distinct on the several islets, should be closely related to each other, and likewise be related, but less closely, to those of the nearest continent or other source, whence immigrants were probably derived. We can see why in two areas, however distant from each other, there should be a correlation, in the presence of identical species, of varieties, of doubtful species, and of distinct but representative species. As the late Edward Forbes often insisted, there is a striking parallelism in the laws of life throughout time and space, the laws governing the succession of forms in past times being- nearly the same with those governing at the present time the differences in different areas. We see this in many facts. The endurance of each species and group of species is continuous in time ; for the exceptions to the rule are so few that they may fairly be attributed to our not having as yet discovered in an intermediate deposit the forms which are therein absent, but which occur above and below ; so in space it certainly is the general rule that the area inhabited by a single species, or by a group of species, is continuous; and the exceptions, which are not rare, may, as I have attempted to show, be accounted for by migration at some former period under different conditions or by occasional means of transport, and by the species having become extinct in the intermediate tracts. Both in time and space species and groups of species have their points of maximum development. Groups of species, belonging either to a certain period of time, or to a certain area, are often characterised by trifling characters in common, as of sculp­ ture or colour. In looking to the long succession of ages, as in now looking to distant provinces throughout the world, we find that some organisms differ little, while others belonging to a different class, �CLASSTFICA TION or to a different order, or even only to a different family of the same order, differ greatly. In both time and space the lower members of each class generally change less than the higher; but there are in both cases marked exceptions to the rule. On my theory, these several relations through­ out time and space are intelligible ; for whether we look to the forms of life which have changed during successive ages within the same quarter of the world, or to those 165 which have changed after having migrated into distant quarters, in both cases the forms within each class have been con­ nected by the same bond of ordinary gene­ ration ; and the more nearly any two forms are related in blood, the nearer they will generally stand to each other in time and space ; in both cases the laws of variation have been the same, and modifications have been accumulated by the same power of natural selection. Chapter XIII. MUTUAL AFFINITIES OF ORGANIC BEINGS: MOR­ PHOLOGY: EMBRYOLOGY: RUDIMENTARY ORGANS Classification, groups subordinate to groups —Natural system—Rules and difficulties in classification, explained on the theory of descent with modification—Classification of varieties—Descent always used in classifica­ tion—Analogical or adaptive characters—Affinities, general, complex, and radiating— Extinction separates and defines groups—■ Morphology, between members of the same class, between parts of the same individual—• Embryology, laws of, explained by variations not supervening at an early age, and being inherited at a corresponding age—Rudi­ mentary organs ; their origin explained— Summary. From the first dawn of life all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in constellations. The existence of groups would have been of simple signification if one group had been exclusively fitted to inhabit the land and another the water—one to feed on fish, another on vegetable matter, and so on ; but the case is widely different in nature, for it is notorious how commonly members of even the same sub-group have different habits. In our second and fourth chapters, on Variation and on Natural Selection, I have attempted to show that it is the widely- ranging, the much diffused and common— that is, the dominant species belonging to the larger genera—which vary most. The varieties, or incipient species, thus produced ultimately become converted, as I believe, into new and distinct species ; and these, on the principle of inheritance, tend to produce other new and dominant species. Consequently, the groups which are now large, and which generally include many dominant species, tend to go on increasing indefinitely in size. I further attempted to show that, from the varying descendants of each species trying to occupy as many and as different places as possible in the economy of nature, there is a constant tendency in their characters to diverge. This conclusion was supported by looking at the great diversity of the forms of life which, in any small area, come into the closest competition, and by looking to certain facts in naturalisation. I attempted also to show that there is a constant tendency in the forms, which are increasing in number and diverging in character, to supplant and exterminate the less divergent, the less improved, and pre­ ceding forms. I request the reader to turn to the diagram illustrating the action, as formerly explained, of these several principles ; and he will see that the inevit­ able result is that the modified descendants �i66 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES proceeding from one progenitor become broken up into groups subordinate to groups. In the diagram each letter on the uppermost line may represent a genus including several species; and all the genera on this line form together one class, for all have descended from one ancient but unseen parent, and, consequently, have inherited something in common. But the three genera on the left hand have, on this same principle, much in common, and form a sub-family, distinct from that including the next two genera on the right hand, which diverged from a common-parent at the fifth stage of descent. These five genera have also much, though less, in common ; and they form a family distinct from that including the three genera still further to the right hand, which diverged at a still earlier period. And all these genera descended from (A) form an order distinct from the genera descended from (I). So that we here have many species descended from a single progenitor grouped into genera ; and the genera are included in, or subordinate to, sub-families, families, and orders, all united into one class. Thus the grand fact in natural history of the sub­ ordination of group under group, which, from its familiarity, does not always sufficiently strike us, is in my judgment explained. Naturalists try to arrange the species, genera, and families in each class on what is called the natural system. But what is meant by this system ? Some authors look at it merely as a scheme for arranging together those living objects which are most alike, and for separating those which are most unlike ; or as an artificial means for enunciating, as briefly as possible, general propositions—that is, by one sen­ tence to give the characters common, for instance, to all mammals; by another, those common to all carnivora ; by another, those common to the dog-genus ; and then, by adding a single sentence, a full description is given to each kind of dog. The ingenuity' and utility of this system are indisputable. But many naturalists think that something more is meant by the natural system : they believe that it reveals the plan of the Creator ; but unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge. Such expressions as that famous one of Linneeus, and which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the char­ acters, seem to imply that something more is included in our classification than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is included, and that propinquity of descent—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings—is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modi­ fication, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications. Let us now consider the rules followed in classification, and the difficulties which are encountered on the view that classifica­ tion either gives some unknown plan of creation or is simply a scheme for enun­ ciating general propositions and of placing together the forms most like each other. It might have been thought (and was in ancient times thought) that those parts of the structure which determined the habits of life and the general place of each being in the economy of nature would be of very high importance in classification. Nothing can be more false. No one regards the external similarity of a mouse to a shrew, of a dugong to a whale, of a whale to a fish, as of any importance. These resemblances, though so intimately connected with the whole life of the being, are ranked as merely “adaptive or analogical characters”; but to the consideration of these resem­ blances we shall have to recur. It may even be given as a general rule that, the less any part of the organisation is con­ cerned with special habits, the more impor­ tant it becomes for classification. As an instance, Owen, in speaking of the dugong, says: “The generative organs, being those which are most remotely related to the habits and food of an animal, I have always regarded as affording very clear indications of its true affinities. We are least likely in the modifications of these organs to mistake a merely adaptive for an essential char­ acter.” So with plants, how remarkable it is that the organs of vegetation on which their whole life depends are of little signifi­ cation, excepting in the first main divisions ; whereas the organs of reproduction, with their product the seed, are of paramount importance ! We must not, therefore, in classifying, trust to resemblances in parts of the organi­ sation, however important they may be for the welfare of the being in relation to the outer world. Perhaps from this cause it has partly arisen that almost all naturalists lay the greatest stress on resemblances in organs of high vital or physiological impor­ tance. No doubt this view of the cl^ssifi- catory importance of organs which are �CLASSIFICATION important is generally, but by no means always, true. But their importance for classification, I believe, depends on their greater constancy throughout large groups of species ; and this constancy depends on such organs having generally been subjected to less change in the adaptation of the species to their conditions of life. That the mere physiological importance of an organ does not determine its classificatory value _ is almost shown by the one fact that in allied groups in which the same organ, as we have every reason to suppose, has nearly the same physiological value its classificatory value is widely different. No naturalist can have worked at any group without being struck with this fact; and it , has been fully acknowledged in the writings of almost every author. It will suffice to quote the highest authority, Robert Brown, who, in speaking of certain organs in the Proteaceae, says their generic importance, “like that of all their parts, not only in this but, as I apprehend, in every natural family, is very unequal, and in some cases seems to be entirely lost.” Again, in another work, he says, the genera of the Connaraceae “ differ in having one or more ovaria, in the exist­ ence or absence of albumen, in the imbri­ cate or valvular aestivation. Any one of these characters singly is frequently of more than generic importance, though here, even when all taken together, they appear insufficient to separate Cnestis from Connarus.” To give an example among insects, in one great division of the Ilymenoptera, the antennae, as Westwood has remarked, are most constant in structure ; in another division they differ much, and the differences are of quite subordinate value in classifica­ tion ; yet no one probably will say that the antennae in these two divisions of the same order are of unequal physiological impor­ tance. Any number of instances could be given of the varying importance for classi­ fication of the same important organ within the same group of beings. Again, no one will say that rudimentary or atrophied organs are of high physio­ logical or vital importance; yet undoubtedly organs in this condition are often of high value in classification. No one will dispute that the rudimentary teeth in the upper jaws of young ruminants and certain rudimentary bones of the leg are highly serviceable in exhibiting the close affinity between Rumi­ nants and Pachyderms. Robert Brown has strongly insisted on the fact that the rudi­ mentary florets are of the highest impor­ tance in the classification of the Grasses. 167 Numerous instances could be given of characters derived from parts which must be considered of very trifling physiological importance, but which are universally admitted as highly serviceable in the defi­ nition of whole groups. For instance, whether or not there is an open passage from the nostrils to the mouth, the only character, according to Owen, which abso­ lutely distinguishes fishes and reptiles—the inflection of the angle of the jaws in Mar­ supials, the manner in which the wings of insects are folded, mere colour in certain Algae, mere pubescence on parts of the flower in grasses, the nature of the dermal covering, as hair or feathers, in the vertebrata. If the Ornithorhynchus had been covered with feathers instead of hair, this external and trifling character would, I think, have been considered by naturalists as important an aid in determining the degree of affinity of this strange creature to birds and reptiles as an approach in structure in any one internal and important organ. The importance, for classification, of trifling characters mainly depends on their being correlated with several other charac­ ters of more or less importance. The value, indeed, of an aggregate of characters is very evident in natural history. Hence, as has often been remarked, a species may depart from its allies in several characters, both of high physiological importance and of almost universal prevalence, and yet leave us in no doubt where it should be ranked. Hence, also, it has been found that a classi­ fication founded on any single character, however important that may be, has always failed, for no part of the organisation is universally constant. The importance of an aggregate of characters, even when none are important, alone explains, I think, that saying of Linnieus, that the characters do not give the genus, but the genus gives the characters; for this saying seems founded on an appreciation of many trifling points of resemblance, too slight to be defined. Certain plants belonging to the Malpighiaceae bear perfect and degraded flowers ; in the latter, as A. de Jussieu has remarked, “ the greater number of the characters proper to the species, to the genus, to the family, to the class, disappear, and thus laugh at our classification.” But when Aspicarpa produced in France, during several years, only degraded flowers, depart­ ing so wonderfully in a number of the most important points of structure from the proper type of the order, yet M. Richard �i68 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES sagaciously saw, as Jussieu observes, that this genus should still be retained among the Malpighiacese. This case seems to me well to illustrate the spirit with which our classifications are sometimes necessarily founded. Practically, when naturalists are at work, they do not trouble themselves about the physiological value of the characters which they use in defining a group, or in allocating any particular species. If they find a character nearly uniform, and common to a great number of forms, and not common to others, they use it as one of high value ; if common to some lesser number, they use it as of subordinate value. This principle has been broadly confessed by some natu­ ralists to be the true one ; and by none more clearly than by that excellent botanist, Aug. St. Hilaire. If certain characters are always found correlated with others, though no apparent bond of connection can be dis­ covered between them, especial value is set on them. . As in most groups of animals, important organs such as thosefor propelling the blood, or for aerating it, or those for propagating the race, are found nearly uniform, they are considered as highly serviceable in classification ; but in some groups of animals all these, the most important vital organs, are found to offer characters of quite subordinate value. We can see why characters derived from the embryo should be of equal importance with those derived from the adult, for our classifications of course include all ages of each species. But it is by no means obvious, on the ordinary view, why the structure of the embryo should be more important for this purpose than that of the adult, which alone plays its full part in the economy of nature. Yet it has been strongly urged by those great naturalists, Milne Edwards and Agassiz, that embryonic characters are the most important of any in the classification of animals ; and this doctrine has very generally been admitted as true. The same fact holds good with flowering plants, of which the two main divisions have been fonnded on characters derived from the embryo—on the number and position of the embryonic leaves or cotyledons, and on the mode of development of the plumule and radicle. In our discussion on embry­ ology we shall see why such characters are so valuable, on the view of classification tacitly including the idea of descent. Our classifications are often plainly influenced by chains of affinities. Nothing can be easier than to denne a number of characters common to all birds; but in the case of crustaceans such definition has hitherto been found impossible. There are crustaceans at the opposite ends of the series which have hardly a character in common ; yet the species at both ends, from being plainly allied to others, and these to others, and so onwards, can be recognised as unequivocally belonging to this and to no other class of the Articulata. Geographical distribution has often been used, though perhaps not quite logically, in classification, more especially in very large groups of closely-allied forms. Temminck insists on the utility or even necessity of this practice in certain groups of birds; and it has been followed by several ento­ mologists and botanists. Finally, with respect to the comparative value of the various groups of species, such as orders, sub-orders, families, sub-families, and genera, they seem to be, at least at present, almost arbitrary. Several of the best botanists, such as Mr. Bentham and others, have strongly insisted on their arbitrary value. Instances could be given among plants and insects of a group of forms, first ranked by practised naturalists as only a genus, and then raised to the rank of a sub-family or family; and this has been done, not because further research has detected important structural differ­ ences, at first overlooked, but because numerous allied species, with slightly different grades of difference, have been subsequently discovered. All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification : that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and in so far all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been uncon­ sciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike. But I must explain my meaning more fully. I believe that the arrangement of the groups within each class, in due sub­ ordination and relation to the other groups, must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural ; but that the amount of difference in the several branches or groups, though �CLASStFICA TION 169 allied in the same degree in blood to their single genus. But this genus, though much common progenitor, may differ greatly, isolated, will still occupy its proper inter­ being due to the different degrees of modifi­ mediate position; for F originally was cation which they have undergone ; and intermediate in character between A and I, this is expressed by the forms being ranked and the several genera descended from under different genera, families, sections, these two genera will have inherited, to a or orders. The reader will best understand certain extent, their characters. This what is meant if he will take the trouble of natural arrangement is shown, as far as referring to the diagram in the preliminary. is possible on paper, in the diagram, but We will suppose the letters A to L to in much too simple a manner. If a represent allied genera, which lived during branching diagram had not been used, the Silurian epoch, and these have des­ and only the names of the groups had cended from a species which existed at an been written in a linear series, it would unknown anterior period. Species of three have been still less possible to have given of these genera (A, F, and I) have trans­ a natural arrangement; and it is notoriously mitted modified descendants to the present not possible to represent in a series, on a day, represented by the fifteen genera («14 flat surface, the affinities which we discover to .s’14) on the uppermost horizontal line. in nature among the beings of the same Now, all these modified descendants from a group. Thus, on the view which I hold, single species are represented as related in the natural system is genealogical in its blood or descent to the same degree ; they arrangement, like a pedigree; but the may metaphorically be called cousins to degrees of modification which the different the same millionth degree ; yet they differ groups have undergone have to be expressed widely and in different degrees from each by ranking them under different so-called other. The forms descended from A, now genera, sub-families, families, sections, broken up into two or three families, con­ orders, and classes. stitute a distinct order from those descended It may be worth while to illustrate this from I, also broken up into two families. view of classification by taking the case of Nor can the existing species descended languages. If we possessed a perfect pedi­ from A be ranked in the same genus with gree of mankind, a genealogical arrange­ the parent A, or those from I with the ment of the races of man would afford the parent I. But the existing genus F'4 may best classification of the various languages be supposed to have been but slightly j now spoken throughout the world ; and if all modified, and it will then rank with the j extinct languages and all intermediate and parent-genus F,just as some few still living slowly-changing dialects had to be included, organic beings belong to Silurian genera. such an arrangement would, I think, be the So that the amount or value of the differ­ only possible one. Yet it might be that ences between organic beings all related some very ancient language had altered to each other in the same degree in blood little, and had given rise to few new has come to be widely different. Never­ languages, while others (owing to the theless, their genealogical arrangement spreading and subsequent isolation and remains strictly true, not only at the present states of civilisation of the several races, time, but at each successive period of descended from a common race) had altered descent. All the modified descendants much, and had given rise to many new from A will have inherited something in languages and dialects. The various degrees common from their common parent, as will of difference in the languages from the all the descendants from I; so will it be same stock would have to be expressed by with each subordinate branch of descen­ groups subordinate to groups ; but the dants, at each successive period. If, how­ proper or even only possible arrangement ever, we choose to suppose that any of the would still be genealogical ; and this would descendants of A or of I have been so be strictly natural, as it would connect much modified as to have more or less together all languages, extinct and modern, completely lost traces of their parentage, by the closest affinities, and would give the in this case them places in a natural classi­ filiation and origin of each tongue. fication will have been more or less com­ In confirmation of this view, let us glance pletely lost—as sometimes seems to have at the classification of varieties which are occurred with existing organisms. All the believed or known to have descended from descendants of the genus F, along its whole one species. These are grouped under line of descent, are supposed to have been species, with sub-varieties under varieties ; but little modified, and they yet form a and with our domestic productions several �> I^o ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES other grades of difference are requisite, as we have seen with pigeons. The origin of the existence of groups subordinate to groups is the same with varieties as with species—namely, closeness of descent with various degrees of modification. Nearly the same rules are followed in classifying varieties as with species. Authors have insisted on the necessity of classing varie­ ties on a natural instead of an artificial system ; we are cautioned, for instance, not to class two varieties of the pine-apple together merely because their fruit, though the most important part, happens to be nearly identical; no one puts the Swedish and common turnips together, though the esculent and thickened stems are so similar. Whatever part is found to be most constant is used in classing varieties : thus the great agriculturist Marshall says the horns are very useful for this purpose with cattle, because they are less variable than the shape or colour of the body, etc.; whereas with sheep the horns are much less service­ able, because less constant. In classing varieties, I apprehend, if we had a real pedigree, a genealogical classification would be universally preferred, and it has been attempted by some authors. For we might feel sure, whether there had been more or less modification, the principle of inheri­ tance would keep the forms together which were allied in the greatest number of points. In tumbler pigeons, though some sub­ varieties differ from the others in the important character of having a longer beak, yet all are kept together from having the common habit of tumbling, but the short-faced breed has nearlyor quite lostthis habit; nevertheless, without any reasoning or thinking on the subject, these tumblers are kept in the same group, because allied in blood and alike in some other respects. If it could be proved that the Hottentot had descended from the Negro, I think he would be classed under the Negro group, however much he might differ in colour and other important characters from negroes. With species in a state of nature, every naturalist has, in fact, brought descent into his classification, for he includes in his lowest grade, or that of a species, the two sexes ; and how enormously these some­ times differ in the most important charac­ ters is known to every naturalist : scarcely a single fact can be predicated in common of the males and hermaphrodites of certain cirripedes, when adult, and yet no one dreams of separating them. The naturalist includes as one species the several larval stages of the same individual, however much they may differ from each other and from the adult ; as he likewise includes the so-called alternate generations of Steenstrup, which can only in a technical sense be con­ sidered as the same individual. He includes monsters ; he includes varieties, not solely because they closely resemble the parent­ form, but because they are descended from it. He who believes that the cowslip is descended from the primrose, or conversely, ranks them together as a single species, and gives a single definition. As soon as three Orchidean forms (Monochanthus, Myanthus, and Catasetum), which had previously been ranked as three distinct genera, were known to be sometimes pro­ duced on the same spike, they were imme­ diately included as a single species. As descent has universally been used in classing together the individuals of the same species, though the males and females and larvae are sometimes extremely differ­ ent; and as it has been used in classing varieties which have undergone a certain and sometimes a considerable amount of modification, may not this same element of descent have been unconsciously used in grouping species under genera, and genera under higher groups, though in these cases the modification has been greater in degree, and has taken a longer time to complete ? I believe it has thus been unconsciously used; and only thus can I understand the several rules and guides which have been followed by our best systematists. We have no written pedigrees; we have to make out community of descent by resemblances of any kind. Therefore, we choose those characters which, as far as we can judge, are the least likely to have been modified in relation to the conditions of life to which each species has been recently exposed. Rudimentary structures on this view are as good as, or even sometimes better than, other parts of the organisation. We care not how trifling a character may be—let it be the mere inflection of the angle of the jaw, the manner in which an insect’s wing is folded, whether the skin be covered by hair or feathers—if it prevail throughout many and different species, especially those having very different habits of life, it assumes high value ; for we can account for its presence in so many forms with such different habits only by its inheritance from a common parent. We may err in this respect in regard to single points of structure, but when several characters, let them be ever �CLASSIFICATION so trifling, occur together throughout a large group of beings having different habits, we may feel almost sure, on the theory of descent, that these characters have been inherited from a common ancestor. And we know that such corre­ lated or aggregated characters have especial value in classification. We can understand why a species or a group of species may depart, in several of its most important characteristics, from its allies, and yet be safely classed with them. This maybe safely done, and is often done, as long as a sufficient number of characters, let them be ever so unimportant, betrays the hidden bond of community of descent. Let two forms have not a single character in common, yet, if these extreme forms are connected together by a chain of inter­ mediate groups, we may at once infer their community of descent, and we put them all into the same class. As we find organs of high physiological importance—those which serve to preserve life under the most diverse conditions of existence—are generally the most constant, we attach especial value to them ; but if these same organs, in another group or section of a group, are found to differ much, we at once value them less in our classification. We shall hereafter, I think, clearly see why embryological characters are of such high classificatory importance. Geographical distribution may sometimes be brought usefully into play in classing large and widely-distributed genera, because all the species of the same genus, inhabiting any distinct and isolated region, have in all probability descended from the same parents. We can understand, on these views, the very important distinction between real affinities and analogical or adaptive resem­ blances. Lamarck first called attention to this distinction, and he has been ably followed by Macleay and others. The resemblance, in the shape of the body and in the fin-like anterior limbs, between the dugong, which is a pachydermatous animal, and the whale, and between both these mammals and fishes, is analogical. Among insects there are innumerable instances : thus Linnaeus, misled by external appear­ ances, actually classed an homopterous insect as a moth. We see something of the same kind even in our domestic varieties, as in the thickened stems of the common and Swedish turnip. The resemblance of the greyhound and racehorse is hardly more fanciful than the analogies which 171 have been drawn by some authors between very distinct animals. On my view of characters being of real importance for classification only in so far as they reveal descent, we can clearly understand why analogical or adaptive character, although of the utmost importance to the welfare of the being, are almost valueless to the systematist. For animals belonging to two most distinct lines of descent may readily become adapted to similar con­ ditions, and thus assume a close external resemblance ; but such resemblances will not reveal—will rather tend to conceal, their blood-relationship to their proper lines of descent. We can also understand the apparent paradox that the very same characters are analogical when one class or order is compared with another, but give true affinities when the members of the same class or order are compared one with another : thus, the shape of the body and fin-like limbs are only analogical when whales are compared with fishes, being adaptations in both classes for swimming through the water; but the shape of the body and fin-like limbs serve as characters exhibiting true affinity between the several members of the whale family; for these cetaceans agree in so many characters, great and small, that we cannot doubt that they have inherited their general shape of body and structure of limbs from a common ancestor. So it is with fishes. As members of distinct classes have often been adapted by successive slight modifications to live under nearly similar circumstances—to inhabit, for instance, the three elements of land, air, and water—we can perhaps understand how it is that a numerical parallelism has sometimes been observed between the sub-groups in distinct classes. Anaturalist, struck by a parallelism of this nature in any one class, by arbitrarily raising or sinking the value of the groups in other classes (and all our experience shows that this valuation has hitherto been arbitrary), could easily extend theparallelism over a wide range ; and thus the septenary, quinary, quaternary, and ternary classifica­ tions have probably arisen. As the modified descendants of dominant species belonging to the larger genera tend to inherit the advantages which made the groups to which they belong large and their parents dominant, they are almost sure to spread widely, and to seize on more and more places in the economy of nature. The larger and more dominant groups thus tend to go on increasing in size; and they �172 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES consequently supplant many smaller and feebler groups. Thus we can account for the fact that all organisms, recent and extinct, are included under a few great orders, under still fewer classes, and all in one great natural system. As showing how few the higher groups are in number, and how widely spread they are throughout the world, the fact is striking that the discovery of Australia has not added a single insect belonging to a new class ; and that in the vegetable kingdom, as I learn from Dr. Hooker, it has added only two or three orders of small size. In the chapter on Geological Succession I attempted to show, on the principle of each group having generally diverged much in character during the long-continued pro­ cess of modification, how it is that the more ancient forms of life often present characters in some slight degree intermediate between existing groups. A few old and intermediate parent-forms, having occasionally trans­ mitted to the present day descendants but little modified, will give to us our so-called osculant or aberrant groups. The more aberrant any form is, the greater must be the number of connecting forms which, on my theory, have been exterminated and utterly lost. And we have some evidence of aberrant forms having suffered severely from extinction, for they are generally repre­ sented by extremely few species ; and such species as do occur are generally very distinct from each other, which, again, implies extinction. The genera Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, for example, would not have been less aberrant had each been represented by a dozen species instead of by a single one ; but such rich­ ness in species, as I find after some investi­ gation, does not commonly fall to the lot of aberrant genera. We can, I think, account for this fact only by looking at aberrant forms as failing groups con­ quered by more successful competitors with a few members preserved by some unusual coincidence of favourable circum­ stances. Mr. Waterhouse has remarked that, when a member belongingto one group of animals exhibits an affinity to a quite distinct group, this affinity in most cases is general and not special: thus, according to Mr. Water­ house, of all Rodents, the bizcacha is most nearly related to Marsupials ; but in the points in which it approaches this order its relations are general, and not to any one marsupial species more than to another. As the points of affinity of the bizcacha to Marsupials are believed to be real and not merely adaptive, they are due, on my theory, to inheritance in common. There­ fore, we must suppose either that all Rodents, including the bizcacha, branched off from some very ancient Marsupial, which will have had a character in some degree intermediate with respect to all existing Marsupials; or that both Rodents and Marsupials branched off from a common progenitor, and that both groups have since undergone much modification in divergent directions. On-either view we may suppose that the bizcacha has retained, by inherit­ ance, more of the character of its ancient progenitor than have other Rodents ; and therefore it will not be specially related to any one existing Marsupial, but indirectly to all, or nearly all, Marsupials, from having partially retained the character of their common progenitor, or of an early member of the group. On the other hand, of all Mar­ supials, as Mr. Waterhouse has remarked, the phascolomys resembles most nearly, not any one species, but the general order of Rodents. In this case, however, it may be strongly suspected that the resemblance is only analogical, owing to the phascolomys having become adapted to habits like those of a Rodent. The elder De Candolle has made nearly similar observations on the general nature of the affinities of distinct orders of plants. On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention, by inheritance, of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together. For the common parent of a whole family of species, now broken up by extinction into distinct groups and sub-groups, will have transmitted some of its characters, modified in various ways and degrees, to all; and the several species will consequently be related to each other by circuitous lines of affinity of various lengths (as may be seen in the diagram so often referred to), mounting up through many predecessors. As it is difficult to show the blood-relationsh ip between the numerous kindred of any ancient and noble family, even by the aid of a genealogical tree, and almost impossible to do this without this aid, we can understand the extraordinary diffi­ culty which naturalists have experienced in describing, without the aid of a diagram, the various affinities which they perceive �CLASSIFICATION between the many living and extinct members of the same great natural class. Extinction, as we have seen in the fourth chapter, has played an important part in defining and widening the intervals between the several groups in each class. We may thus account even for the distinctness of whole classes from each other—for instance, of birds from all other vertebrate animals— by the belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progenitors of the other vertebrate classes. There has been less entire extinction of the forms of life which once connected fishes with batrachians. There has been still less in some other classes, as in that of the Crustacea, for here the most wonderfully diverse forms are still tied together by a long, but broken, chain of affinities. Extinction has only separated groups : it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible. We shall see this by turning to the diagram : the letters A to L may represent eleven Silurian genera, some of which have produced large groups of modi­ fied descendants. Every intermediate link between these eleven genera and their primordial parent, and every intermediate link in each branch and sub-branch of their descendants, may be supposed to be still alive, and the links to be as fine as those between the finest varieties. In this case it would be quite impossible to give any definition by which the several members cf the several groups could be distinguished from their more immediate parents ; or these parents from their ancient and un­ knownprogenitor. Yet the natural arrange­ ment in the diagram would still hold good ; and, on the principle of inheritance, all the forms descended from A, or from I, would have something in common. In a tree we can specify this or that branch, though at the actual fork the two unite and blend together. We could not, as I have said, define the several groups ; but we could pick out types, or forms, representing most of the characters of each group, whether large or small, and thus give a general idea of the value of the differences between them. 173 This is what we should be driven to if we were ever to succeed in collecting all the forms in any class which have lived through­ out all time and space. We shall certainly never succeed in making so perfect a collec­ tion ; nevertheless, in certain classes, we are tending in this direction; and Milne Edwards has lately insisted, in an able paper, on the high importance of looking to types, whether or not we can separate and define the groups to which such types belong. Finally, we have seen that natural selec­ tion, which results from the struggle for existence, and which almost inevitably induces extinction and divergence of char­ acter in many descendants from one dominant parent-species, explains that great and universal feature in the affinities of all organic beings—namely, their subordina­ tion in group under group. We use the element of descent in classing the indi­ viduals of both sexes and of all ages, although having few characters in common, under one species; we use descent in classing acknowledged varieties, however different they may be from their parent; and I believe this element of descent is the hidden bond of connection which naturalists have sought under the term of the Natural System. On this idea of the natural system being, in so far as it has been perfected, genealogical in its arrange­ ment, with the grades of difference between the descendants from a common parent, expressed by the terms genera, families, order, etc., we can understand the rules which we are compelled to follow in our classification. We can understand why we value certain resemblances far more than others ; why we are permitted to use rudimentary and useless organs, or others of trifling physiological importance ; why, in comparing one group with a distinct group, we summarily reject analogical or adaptive characters, and yet use these same characters within the limits of the same group. We can clearly see how it is that all living and extinct forms can be grouped together in one great system ; and how the several members of each class are con­ nected together by the most complex and radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextric­ able web of affinities between the members of any one class ; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress. �174 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Morphology.—We have seen that the members of the same class, independently of their habits of life, resemble each other in the general plan of their organisation. The resemblance is often expressed by the term “unity of type,” or by saying that the several parts and organs in the different species of the class are homologous. The whole subject is included under the general name of morphology. This is the most inte­ resting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul. What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, m the same relative positions ? Geoffroy St. Hilaire has insisted strongly on the high importance of relative connection in homo­ logous organs : the parts may change to almost any extent in form and size, and yet they always remain connected together in the same order. We never find, for instance, the bones of the arm and forearm, or of the thigh and leg, transposed. Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects : what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle?—yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillae. Analogous laws govern the construction of the mouths and limbs of crustaceans. So it is with the flowers of plants. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. The hope­ lessness of the attempt has been expressly admitted by Owen in his most interesting work on The Nature of Limbs. On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is—that it has so pleased the Creator to con­ struct each animal and plant. The explanation is manifest on the theory of the natural selection of successive slight modifications—each modification being profitable in some way to the modified form, but often affecting by correlation of growth other parts of the organisation. I n changes of this nature there will be little or no tendency to modify the original pattern, or to transpose parts. The bones of a limb might be shortened and widened to any extent, and become gradually enveloped in thick membrane, so as to serve as a fin; or a webbed foot might have all its bones, or certain bones, lengthened to any extent, and the membrane connecting them increased to any extent, so as to serve as a wing; yet in all this great amount of modification there will be no tendency to alter the frame­ work of bones or the relative connection of the several parts. If we suppose that the ancient progenitor—the archetype, as it may be called—of all mammals had its limbs constructed on the existing general pattern, for whatever purpose they served, we can at once perceive the plain signification of the homologous construction of the limbs throughout the whole class. So with the mouths of insects, we have only to suppose that their common progenitor had an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillae, these parts being perhaps very simple in form; and then natural selection, acting on some originally created form, will account for the infinite diversity in structure and function of the mouths of insects. Never­ theless, it is conceivable that the general pattern of an organ might become so much obscured as to be finally lost, by the atrophy and ultimately by the complete abortion of certain parts, by the soldering together of other parts, and by the doubling or multi­ plication of others—variations which we know to be within the limits of possibility. In the paddles of the extinct gigantic sea­ lizards, and in the mouths of certain suctorial crustaceans, the general pattern seems to have been thus to a certain extent obscured. There is another and equally curious branch of the present subject—namely, the comparison, not of the same part in different members of a class, but of the different parts or organs in the same individual. Most physiologists believe that the bones of the skull are homologous with—that is, correspond in number and in relative con­ nection with—the elemental parts of a cer­ tain number of vertebrae. The anterior and posterior limbs in each member of the vertebrate and articulate classes are plainly homologous. We see the same law in comparing the wonderful complex jaws and legs in crustaceans. It is familiar to almost every one that in a flowei- the relative position of the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, as well as their intimate structure, are intelligible on the view that they consist of metamorphosed leaves, arranged in a �MORPHOLOGY spire. In monstrous plants we often get direct evidence of the possibility of one organ being transformed into another; and we can actually see in embryonic crus­ taceans and in many other animals, and in flowers, that organs which, when mature, become extremely different are at an early stage of growth exactly alike. How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation! Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and such extraordinary shaped pieces of bone ? As Owen has remarked, the benefit derived from the yielding of the separate pieces in the act of parturition of mammals will by no means explain the same construction in the skulls of birds. Why should similar bones have been created in the formation of the wing and leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes ? Why should one crustacean which has an extremely complex mouth formed of many parts con­ sequently always have fewer legs ; or, con­ versely, those with many legs have simpler mouths ? Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern ? On the theory of natural selection, we can satisfactorily answer these questions. In the vertebrata we see a series of internal vertebrae bearing certain processes and appendages ; in the articulata we see the body divided into a series of segments bearing external appendages; and in flower­ ing plants we see a series of successive spiral whorls of leaves. An indefinite repe­ tition of the same part or organ is the common characteristic (as Owen has observed) of all low or little modified forms ; therefore, we may readily believe that the unknown progenitor of the verte-, brata possessed many vertebrae; the un­ known progenitor of the articulata, many segments ; and the unknown progenitor of flowering plants, many spiral whorls of leaves. We have formerly seen that parts many times repeated are eminently liable to vary in number and structure; conse­ quently, it is quite probable that natural selection, during a long-continued course of modification, should have seized on a certain number of the primordially similar elements, many times repeated, and have adapted them to the most diverse purposes. And as the whole amount of modification will have been effected by slight successive steps, we need, not wonder at discovering 175 in such parts or organs a certain degree of fundamental resemblance, retained by the strong principle of inheritance. In the great class of molluscs, though we can homologise the parts of one species with those of other and distinct species, we can indicate but few serial homologies; that is, we are seldom enabled to say that one part or organ is homologous with another in the same individual. And we can understand this fact; for in molluscs, even in the lowest members of the class, we do not find nearly so much indefinite repetition of any one part as we find in the other great classes of the animal and vege­ table kingdoms. Naturalists frequently speak of the skull as formed of metamorphosed vertebrae ; the jaws of crabs as metamorphosed legs ; the stamens and pistils of flowers as metamor­ phosed leaves ; but it would in these cases probably be more correct, as Professor Huxley has remarked, to speak of both skull and vertebrae, both jaws and legs, etc., as having been metamorphosed, not one from the other, but from some common element. Naturalists, however, use such language only in a metaphorical sense : they are far from meaning that, during a long course of descent, primordial organs of any kind—vertebrae in the one case and legs in the other—have actually been modified into skulls or jaws. Yet so strong is the appearance of a modification of this nature having occurred that naturalists can hardly avoid employing language having this plain signification. On my view these terms may be used literally; and the wonderful fact of the jaws, for instance, of a crab retaining numerous characters, which they would probably have retained through inheritance if they had really been meta­ morphosed during a long course of descent from true legs, or from some simple appen­ dage, is explained. Embryology.—It has already been cas­ ually remarked that certain organs in the individual which, when mature, become widely different, and serve for different purposes, are in the embryo exactly alike. The embryos, also, of distinct animals within the same class are often strikingly similar: a better proof of this cannot be given than a circumstance mentioned by Agassiz—namely, that, having forgotten to ticket the embryo of some vertebrate animal, he cannot now tell whether it be that of a mammal, bird, or reptile. The vermiform larvae of moths, flies, beetles, etc., resemble �176 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES each other much more closely than do the mature insects ; but in the case of larvae the embryos are active, and have been adapted for special lines of life. A trace of the law of embryonic resemblance some­ times lasts till a rather late age : thus birds of the same genus and of closely-allied genera often resemble each other in their first and second plumage ; as we see in the spotted feathers in the thrush group. In the cat tribe most of the species are striped or spotted in lines, and stripes can be plainly distinguished in the whelp of the lion. We occasionally, though rarely, see something of this kind in plants : thus the embryonic leaves of the ulex or furze and the first leaves of the phyllodineous acaceas are pinnate or divided like the ordinary leaves of the leguminosae. The points of structure in which the embryos of widely-different animals of the same class resemble each other often have no direct relation to their conditions of existence. We cannot,for instance, suppose that in the embryos of the vertebrata the peculiar loop-like course of the arteries near the branchial slits are related to similar conditions—in the young mammal which is nourished in the womb of its mother, in the egg of the bird which is hatched in a nest, and in the spawn of a frog under water. We have no more reason to believe in such a relation than we have to believe that the same bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, and fin of a porpoise are related to similar con­ ditions of life. No one will suppose that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the spots on the young blackbird, are of any use to these animals, or are related to the conditions to which they are exposed. The case, however, is different when an animal during any part of its embryonic career is active, and has to provide for itself. The period of activity may come on earlier or later in life ; but, whenever it comes on, the adaptation of the larva to its conditions of life is just as perfect and as beautiful as in the adult animal. From such special adaptations the similarity of the larvae or active embryos of allied animals is sometimes much obscured ; and cases could be given of the larvae of two species, or of two groups of species, differing quite as much, or even more, from each other than do their adult parents. In most cases, however, the larvae, though active, still obey, more or less closely, the law of common embryonic resemblance. Cirripedes afford a good instance of this : even the illustrious Cuvier did not perceive that a barnacle was, as it certainly is, a crusta­ cean ; but a glance at the larva shows this to be the case in an unmistakeable manner. So, again, the two main divisions of cirri­ pedes, the pedunculated and sessile, which differ widely in external appearance, have larvae in all their stages barely distinguish­ able. The embryo in the course of develop­ ment generally rises in organisation. I use this expression, though I am aware that it is hardly possible to define clearly what is meant by the organisation being higher or lower. But no one probably will dispute that the butterfly is higher than the cater­ pillar. In some cases, however, the mature animal is generally considered as lower in the scale than the larva, as with certain parasitic crustaceans. To refer once again to cirripedes : the larvae in the first stage have three pairs of legs, a very simple single eye, and a probosciformed mouth, with which they feed largely, for they increase much in size. In the second stage, answering to the chrysalis stage of butterflies, they have six pairs of beauti­ fully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae ; but they have a closed and imperfect mouth, aud cannot feed: their function at this stage is to search by their well-developed organs of sense, and to reach by their active powers of swimming a proper place on which to become attached and to undergo their final metamorphosis. When this is completed they are fixed for life : their legs are now converted into prehensile organs; they again obtain a well-constructed mouth ; but they have no antennae, and their two eyes are now recon­ verted into a minute, single, and very simple eye-spot. In this last and complete state cirripedes may be considered as either more highly or more lowly organised than they were in the larval condition. But in some genera the larvae become developed either into hermaphrodites having the ordinary structure, or into what I have called complemental males; and in the latter the development has assuredly been retrograde, for the male is a mere sack, which lives for a short time, and is destitute of mouth, stomach, or other organ of im­ portance, excepting for reproduction. We are so much accustomed to see dif­ ferences in structure between the embryo and the adult, and likewise a close similarity in the embryos of widely-different animals within the same class, that we might be led �EMBRYOLOGY 177 will be tall or short, or what its precise to look at these facts as necessarily continfeatures will be. The question is not at gent in some manner on growth. But there what period of life any variation has been is no obvious reason why, for instance, the caused, but at what period it is fully dis­ wing of a bat, or the fin of a porpoise, played. The cause may have acted, and I ghchlld not have been sketched out with all believe generally has acted, even before the the parts in proper proportion as soon as embryo is formed; and the variation may any structure became visible in the embryo. be due to the male and female sexual And ill some whole groups of animals and elements having been affected by the con­ in certain members of other groups the ditions to which either parent or their embryo does not at any period differ widely ancestors have been exposed. Neverthe­ from the adult. Thus Owen has remarked less, an effect thus caused at a very early in regard to cuttle-fish: “There is no meta­ period, even before the formation of the morphosis ; the cephalopodic character is embryo, may appear late in life; as when manifested long before the parts of the an hereditary disease, which appears in old embryo are completed”; and again in age alone, has been communicated to the spiders: “There is nothing worthy to be called a metamorphosis.” The larvae of offspring from the reproductive element of one parent. Or, again, as when the horns insects, whether adapted to the most diverse of cross-bred cattle have been affected by and active habits, or quite inactive, being the shape of the horns of either parent. fed by their parents or placed in the midst For the welfare of a very young animal, as of proper nutriment, yet nearly all pass through a similar worm-like stage of de­ long as it remains in its mother’s womb, or velopment ; but in some few cases, as in in the egg, or as long as it is nourished and that of Aphis, if we look to the admirable protected by its parent, it must be quite drawings by Professor Huxley of the de­ unimportant whether most of its characters velopment of this insect, we see no trace of are fully acquired a little earlier or later in life. It would not signify, for instance, to a the vermiform stage. How, then, can we explain these several bird which obtained its food best by having a long beak whether or not it assumed a facts in embryology—-namely, the very beak of this particular length, as long as it general, but not universal, difference in structure between the embryo and the was fed by its parents. Hence, I conclude that it is quite possible that each of the adult; of parts in the same individual many successive modifications by which embryo, which ultimately became very un­ each species has acquired its present like and serve for diverse purposes, being at this early period of growth alike; of i structure may have supervened at a not very early period of life; and some direct embryos of different species within the evidence fromourdomesticanimals supports same class generally, but not universally, resembling each other; of the structure of this view. But in other cases it is quite the embryo not being closely related to its possible that each successive modification, conditions of existence, except when the or most of them, may have appeared at an embryo becomes at any period of life active extremely early period. and has to provide for itself; of the embryo I have stated in the first chapter that apparently having sometimes a higher there is some evidence to render it probable organisation than the mature animal into that, at whatever age any variation first which it is developed ? I believe that all appears in the parent, it tends to reappear these facts can be explained, as follows, on at a corresponding age in the offspring. the view of descent with modification. Certain variations can only appear at cor­ It is commonly assumed, perhaps from responding ages—for instance, peculiarities monstrosities often affecting the embryos in the caterpillar, cocoon, or imago states at a very early period, that slight variations of the silk-moth; or, again, in the horns of necessarily appear at an equally early almost full-grown cattle. But, further than period. But we have little evidence on this, variations which, for all that we can filis head—indeed, the evidence rather see, might have appeared earlier in life points the other way; for it is notorious that tend to appear at a corresponding age in breeders of cattle, horses, and various fancy the offspring and parent. I am far from animals cannot positively tell, until some meaning that this is invariably the case ; fee after the animal has been born, what and I could give a good many cases of its merits or form will ultimately turn out. variations (taking the word in the largest We see this plainly in our own children : sense) which have supervened at an earlier W cannot always tell whether the child age in the child than in the parent. N �i78 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES These two principles, if their truth be admitted, will, I believe, explain all the above specified leading facts in embryology. But first let us look at a few analogous cases in domestic varieties. Some authors who have written on Dogs maintain that the greyhound and bull-dog, though appear­ ing so different, are really varieties most closely allied, and have probably descended from the same wild stock ; hence, I was curious to see how far their puppies differed from each other: I was told by breeders that they differed just as much as their parents, and this, judging by the eye, seemed almost to be the case; but, on actually measuring the old dogs and their six-days old puppies, I found that the puppies had not nearly acquired their full amount of proportional difference. So, again, I was told that the foals of cart and race horses differed as much as the full-grown animals ; and this surprised me greatly, as I think it probable that the difference between these two breeds has been wholly caused by selection under domestication; but, having had careful measurements made of the dam and of a three-days old colt of a race and heavy cart-horse, I find that the colts have by no means acquired their full amount of pro­ portional difference. As the evidence appears to me conclusive that the several domestic breeds of Pigeon have descended from one wild species, I compared young pigeons of various breeds within twelve hours after being hatched; I carefully measured the proportions (but will not here give details) of the beak, width of mouth, length of nostril and of eyelid, size of feet and length of leg, in the wild stock, in pouters, fantails, runts, barbs, dragons, carriers, and tumblers. Now, some of these birds, when mature, differ so extra­ ordinarily in length and form of beak that they would, I cannot doubt, be ranked in distinct genera had they been natural pro­ ductions. But when the nestling birds of these several breeds were placed in a row, though most of them could be distinguished from each other, yet their proportional differences in the above specified several points were incomparably less than in the full-grown birds. Some characteristic points of difference—for instance, that of the width of mouth — could hardly be detected in the young. But there was one remarkable exception to this rule, for the young of the short-faced tumbler differed from the young of the wild rock-pigeon and of the other breeds, in all its proportions, almost exactly as much as in the adult state. The two principles above given seem to me to explain these facts in regard to the latter _ embryonic stages of our domestic varieties. Fanciers select their horses, dogs, and pigeons, for breeding, when they are nearly grown up : they are indifferent whether the desired qualities and structures have been acquired earlier or later in life if the full-grown animal possess them. And the cases just given, more especially that of pigeons, seem to show that the character­ istic differences which give value to each breed, and which have been accumulated by man’s selection, have not generally first appeared at an early period of life, and have been inherited by the offspring at a corres­ ponding not early period. But the case of the short-faced tumbler, which, when twelve hours old, had acquired its proper propor­ tions, proves that this is not the universal rule ; for here the characteristic differences must either have appeared at an earlier period than usual, or, if not so, the diffe­ rences must have been inherited, not at the corresponding, but at an earlier age. Now, let us apply these facts, and the above two principles—which latter, though not proved true, can be shown to be in some degree probable—to species in a state of nature. Let us take a genus of birds, descended on my theory from some one parent-species, and of which the several new species have become modified through natural selection in accordance with their diverse habits. Then, from the many slight successive steps of variation having super­ vened at a rather late age, and having been inherited at a corresponding age, the young of the new species of our supposed genus will manifestly tend to resemble each other much more closely than do the adults, just as we have seen in the case of pigeons. We may extend this view to whole families, or even classes. The fore-limbs, for instance, which served as legs in the parent-species may have become, by a long course of modification, adapted in one descendant to act as hands, in another as paddles, in another as wings ; and on the above two principles—namely, of each successive modi­ fication supervening at a rather late age, and being inherited at a corresponding late age— the fore-limbs in the embryos of the several descendants of the parent-species will still resemble each other closely, for they will not have been modified. But in each of our new species the embryonic fore-limbs will differ greatly from the fore-limbs in the �EMBRYOLOGY mature animal; the limbs in the latter having undergone much modification at a rather late period of life, and having thus been converted into hands, or paddles, or wings. Whatever influence long-continued exercise or use on the one hand, and disuse on the other, may have in modifying an organ, such influence will mainly affect the mature animal, which has come to its full powers of activity and has to gain its own living ; and the effects thus produced will be inherited at a corresponding mature age. Whereas the young will remain unmodified, or be modified in a lesser degree, by the effects of use and disuse. In certain cases the successive steps of variation might supervene, from causes of which we are wholly ignorant, at a very early period of life, or each step might be inherited at an earlier period than that at which it first appeared. In either case (as with the short-faced tumbler) the young or embryo would closely resemble the mature parent-form. We have seen that this is the rule of development in certain whole groups of animals, as with cuttle-fish and spiders, and with a few members of the great class of insects, as with Aphis. With respect to the final cause of the young in these cases not undergoing any metamorphosis, or closely resembling their parents from their earliest age, we can see that this would result from the two following contingencies : firstly, from the young, during a course of modification carried on for many genera­ tions, having to provide for their own wants at a very early stage of development; and, secondly, from their following exactly the same habits of life with their parents, for in this case, it would be indispensable, for the existence of the species, that the child should be modified at a very early age in the same manner with its parents, in accor­ dance with their similar habits. Some further explanation, however, of the embryo not undergoing any metamorphosis is perhaps requisite. If, on the other hand, it profited the young to follow habits of life in any degree different from those of their parent, and consequently to be constructed in a slightly different manner, then, on the principle of inheritance at corresponding ages, the active young or larvae might easily be rendered by natural selection different to any conceivable extent from their parents. Such differences might also become cor­ related with successive stages of develop­ ment ; so that the larvae, in the first stage, might differ greatly from the larvae in the second stage, as we have seen to be the case 179 with cirripedes. The adult might become fitted for sites or habits in which organs of locomotion or of the senses, etc., would be useless ; and in this case the final metamor­ phosis would be said to be retrograde. As all the organic beings, extinct and recent, which have ever lived on this earth have to be classed together, and as all have been connected by the finest gradations, the best, or indeed, if our collections were nearly perfect, the only possible, arrange­ ment would be genealogical: descent being on my view the hidden bond of con­ nection which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the natural system. On this view we can understand how it is that, in the eyes of most naturalists, the structure of the embryo is even more important for classification than that of the adult. For the embryo is the animal in its less modified state, and in so far it reveals the structure of its progenitor. In two groups of animals, however much they may at present differ from each other in structure and habits, if they pass through the same or similar embryonic stages, we may feel assured that they have both descended from the same or nearly similar parents, and are therefore in that degree closely related. Thus com­ munity in embryonic structure reveals com­ munity of descent. It will reveal this community of descent, however much the structure of the adult may have been modi­ fied and obscured. We have seen, for instance, that cirripedes can at once be recognised by their larvae as belonging to the great class of crustaceans. As the embryonic state of each species and group of species partially shows us the structure of their less modified ancient progenitors, we can scarcely see why ancient and extinct forms of life should resemble the embryos of their descendants—our existing species. Agassiz believes this to be a law of nature; but I am bound to confess that I only hope to see the law hereafter proved true. It can be proved true in those cases alone in which the ancient state, now supposed to be represented in existing embryos, has not been obliterated, either by the successive variations in a long course of modification having supervened at a very early age, or by the variations having been inherited at an earlier period than that at which they first appeared. It should also be borne in mind that the supposed law of resemblance of ancient forms of life to the embryonic stages of recent forms may be true, but yet, owing to the geological record not extend­ ing far enough back in time, may remain �i8o ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES for a long period, or for ever, incapable of demonstration. Thus, as it seems to me, the leading facts in embryology, which are second in importance to none in natural history, are explained on the principle of slight modifi­ cations not appearing, in the many descen­ dants from one ancient progenitor, at a very early period in the life of each, though per­ haps caused at the earliest, and being in­ herited at a corresponding not early period. Embryology rises greatly in interest when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals. Rudimentary, atrophied, or aborted Organs.—Organs or parts in this strange condition, bearing the stamp of inutility, are extremely common throughout nature. For instance, rudimentary mamma: are very general in the males of mammals : I presume that the “ bastard-wing ” in birds may be safely considered as a digit in a rudimentary state: in very many snakes one lobe of the lungs is rudimentary ; in other snakes there are rudiments of the pelvis and hind limbs. Some of the cases of rudimentary organs are extremely curious ; for instance, the presence of teeth in fcetal whales, which, when grown up, have not a tooth in their heads ; and the presence of teeth, which never cut through the gums, in the upper jaws of our unborn calves. It has even been stated on good authority that rudiments of teeth can be detected in the beaks of certain embryonic birds. Nothing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight, yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together 1 The meaning of rudimentary organs is often quite unmistakeable ; for instance, there are beetles of the same genus (and even of the same species) resembling each other most closely in all respects, one of which will have full-sized wings, and another mere rudiments of membrane ; and here it is impossible to doubt that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary organs sometimes retain their potentiality, and are merely not developed : this seems to be the case with the mammae of male mammals, for many instances are on record of these organs having become well developed in full-grown fnales, and having secreted milk. So, again, there are normally four developed and two rudimentary teats in the udders of the genus Bos, but in our domestic cows the two sometimes become developed and give milk. In plants of the same species the petals sometimes occur as mere rudiments, and sometimes in a well-developed state. In plants with sepa­ rated sexes the male flowers often have a rudiment of a pistil; and Kolreuter found that, by crossing such male plants with an hermaphrodite species, the rudiment of the pistil in the hybrid offspring was much increased in size ; and this shows that the rudiment and the perfect pistil are essen­ tially alike in nature. An organ serving for two purposes may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other. Thus in plants the office of the pistil is to allow the pollen-tubes to reach the ovules protected in the ovarium at its base. The pistil consists of a stigma supported on the style ; but in some Compositas the male florets, which, of course, cannot be fecun­ dated, have a pistil which is in a rudi­ mentary state, for it is not crowned with a stigma ; but the style remains well developed, and is clothed with hairs as in other Composite, for the purpose of brushing the pollen out of the surrounding anthers. Again, an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for a distinct object: in certain fish the swim­ bladder seems to be nearly rudimentary for its proper function of giving buoyancy, but has become converted into a nascent breathing organ or lung. Other similar instances could be given. Organs, however little developed, if of use, should not be called rudimentary; they cannot properly be said to be in an atro­ phied condition; they may be called nascent, and may hereafter be developed to any extent by natural selection. Rudi­ mentary organs, on the other hand, are essentially useless, as teeth which never cut through the gums; in a still less developed condition, they would be of still less use. They cannot, therefore, under their present condition, have been formed by natural selection, which acts solely by the preserva­ tion of useful modifications; they have been retained, as we shall see, by inheritance, and relate to a former condition of their possessor. It is difficult to know what are nascent organs ; looking to the future, we cannot of course tell how any part will be developed, and whether it is now nascent; looking to the past, creatures with an organ in a nascent condition will generally have �RUDIMENTARY ORGANS been supplanted and exterminated by their successors with the organ in a more perfect and developed condition. The wing of the penguin is of high service, and acts as a fin; it may, therefore, represent the nascent state of the wings of birds ; not that I believe this to be the case—it is more prob­ ably a reduced organ, modified for a new function: the wing of the Apteryx is useless, and is truly rudimentary. The mammary glands of the Ornithorhynchus may, per­ haps, be considered, in comparison with the udder of a cow, as in a nascent state. The ovigerous frena of certain cirripedes, which are only slightly developed and which have ceased to give attachment to the ova, are nascent branchiae. Rudimentary organs in the individuals of the same species are very liable to vary in degree of development and in other respects. Moreover, in closely-allied species the degree to which the same organ has been rendered rudimentary occasionally differs much. This latter fact is well exemplified in the state of the wings of the female moths in certain groups. Rudimentary * organs may be utterly aborted ; and this implies that we find in an animal or plant no trace of an organ which analogy would lead us to expect to find, and which is occasionally found in monstrous individuals of the species. Thus in the snapdragon (antirrhinum) we generally do not find a rudiment of a fifth stamen ; but this may sometimes be seen. In tracing the homo­ logies of the same part in different members of a class, nothing is more common or more necessary than the use and discovery of rudiments. This is well shown in the drawings given by Owen of the bones of the leg of the horse, ox, and rhinoceros. It is an important fact that rudimentary organs, such as teeth in the upper jaws of whales and ruminants, can often be detected in the embryo, but afterwards wholly dis­ appear. It is also, I believe, a universal rule that a rudimentary part or organ is of greater size relatively to the adjoining parts in the embryo than in the adult ; so that the organ at this early age is less rudi­ mentary, or even cannot be said to be in any degree rudimentary. Hence, also, a rudimentary organ in the adult is often said to have retained its embryonic con­ dition. I have now given the leading facts with respect to rudimentary organs. In reflect­ ing on them, everyone must be struck with astonishment; forthe same reasoning power which tells us plainly that most parts a>nd 181 organs are exquisitely adapted for certain purposes, tells us with equal plainness that these rudimentary or atrophied organs are imperfect and useless. In works on natural history rudimentary organs are generally said to have been created “ for the sake of symmetry,” or in order “ to complete the scheme of nature”; but this seems to me no explanation—merely a re­ statement of the fact. Would it be thought sufficient to say that, because planets revolve in elliptic courses round the sun, satellites follow the same course round the planets, for the sake of symmetry, and to complete the scheme of nature ? An eminent physiologist accounts for the pre­ sence of rudimentary organs by supposing that they serve to excrete matter in excess, or injurious to the system ; but can we suppose that the minute papilla, which often represents the pistil in male flowers, and which is formed merely of cellular tissue, can thus act ? Can we suppose that the formation of rudimentary teeth, which are subsequently absorbed, can be of any service to the rapidly-growing embryonic calf by the excretion of precious phosphate of lime? When a man’s fingers have been amputated, imperfect nails sometimes appear on the stumps : I could as soon believe that these vestiges of nails have appeared, not from unknown laws of growth, but in order to excrete horny matter, as that the rudimen­ tary nails on the fin of the manatee were formed for this purpose. On my view of descent with modification, the origin of rudimentary organs is simple. We have plenty of cases of rudimentary organs in our domestic productions—as the stump of a tail in tailless breeds, the vestige of an ear in earless breeds, the reappear­ ance of minute dangling horns in hornless breeds of cattle (more especially, according to Youatt, in young animals), and the state of the whole flower in the cauliflower. We often see rudiments of various parts in monsters. But I doubt whether any of these cases throw light on the origin of rudimentary organs in a state of nature further than by showing that rudiments can be produced; for I doubt whether species under nature ever undergo abrupt changes. I believe that disuse has been the main agency; that it has led in successive generations to the gradual reduction of various organs until they have become rudimentary—as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabiting dark caverns, and of the wings of birds inhabiting oceanic islands, which have seldom been forced to �182 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES take flight, and have ultimately lost the power of flying. Again, an organ useful under certain conditions might become injurious under others, as with the wings of beetles living on small and exposed islands; and in this case natural selection would continue slowly to reduce the organ until it was rendered harmless and rudi­ mentary. Any change in function which can be effected by insensibly smali steps is within the power of natural selection ; so that an organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose might be modified and used for another purpose. Or an organ might be retained for one alone of its former functions. An organ, when rendered useless, may well be variable, for its variations cannot be checked by natural selection. At whatever period of life disuse or selection reduces an organ, and this will generally be when the being has come to maturity and to its full powers of action, the principle of inherit­ ance at corresponding ages will reproduce the organ in its reduced state at the same age, and, consequently, will seldom affect or reduce it in the embryo. Thus we can understand the greater relative size of rudimentary organs in the embryo and their lesser relative size in the adult. But if each step of the process of reduction were to be inherited, not at the corresponding age, but at an extremely early period of life (as we have good reason to believe to be possible), the rudimentary part would tend to be wholly lost, and we should have a case of complete abortion. The prin­ ciple also of economy, explained in a former chapter, by which the materials forming any part or structure, if not useful to the possessor, will be saved as far as is possible, will probably often come into play ; and this will tend to cause the entire obliteration of a rudimentary organ. As the presence of rudimentary organs is thus due to the tendency in every part of the organisation, which has long existed, to be inherited, we can understand, on the genealogical view of classification, how it is that systematists have found rudimentary parts as useful as, or even sometimes more useful than, parts of high physiological importance. Rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the.spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation. On the view of descent with modification, we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless con­ dition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do on the ordinary doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated, and can be accounted for by the laws of inheritance. Summary.—In this chapter I have attempted to show that the subordination of group to group in all organisms through­ out all time; that the nature of the rela­ tionship by which all living and extinct beings are united by complex, radiating, and circuitous lines of affinities into one grand system; the rules followed and the difficulties encountered by naturalists in their classifications ; the value set upon characters, if constant and prevalent, whether of high vital importance or of the most trifling importance, or, as in rudi­ mentary organs, of no importance ; the wide opposition in value between analogical or adaptive characters and characters of true affinity ; and other such rules—all naturally follow on the view of the common parentage of those forms which are con­ sidered by naturalists as allied, together* with their modification through natural selection, with its contingencies of extinc­ tion and divergence of character. In con­ sidering this view of classification, it should be borne in mind that the element of descent has been universally used in ranking together the sexes, ages, and acknowledged varieties of the same species, however different they may be in structure. If we extend the use of this element of descent -—the only certainly known cause of simi­ larity in organic beings—we shall under­ stand what is meant by the natural system : it is genealogical in its attempted arrange­ ment, with the grades of acquired difference marked by the terms varieties, species, genera, families, orders, and classes. On this same view of descent with modi­ fication, all the great facts in Morphology become intelligible—whether we look to the same pattern displayed in the homologous organs, to whatever purpose applied, of the different species of a class, or to the homo­ logous parts constructed on the same pattern in each individual animal and plant. On the principle of successive slight variations, not necessarily or generally supervening at a very early period of life, and being inherited at a corresponding period, we can understand the great leading facts in Embryology ; namely, the resem­ blance in an individual embryo of the �RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION homologous parts, which, when matured, will become widely different from each other in structure and function ; and the resemblance in different species of a class of the homologous parts or organs, though fitted in the adult members for purposes, as different as possible. Larva; are active embryos, which have become specially modified in relation to their habits of life, through the principle of modifications being specially inherited at corresponding ages. On this same principle—and bearing, in mind that, when organs are reduced in size, either from disuse or selection, it will generally be at that period of life when the being has to provide for its own wants, and bearing in mind how strong is the principle of inheritance—the occurrence of rudimen­ tary organs and their final abortion present 183 to us no inexplicable difficulties ; on the contrary, their presence might have been even anticipated. The importance of em­ bryological characters and of rudimentary organs in classification is intelligible, on the view that an arrangement is only so far natural as it is genealogical. Finally, the several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter seem to me to proclaim so plainly that the innu­ merable species, genera, and families «of organic beings with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent, that I should without hesitation adopt this view, even if it were unsupported by other facts or arguments. Chapter XIV. RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION Recapitulation of the difficulties on the theory of Natural Selection — Recapitulation of the general and special circumstances in its favour —Causes of the general belief in the immut­ ability of species—-How far the theory of natural selection may be extended—Effects of its adoption on the study of natural history— Concluding remarks. As this whole volume is one long argument, it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly re­ capitulated. That many and serious objections may be advanced against the theory of descent with modification through natural selection I do not deny. I have endeavoured to give them their full force. Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination in­ superably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions— namely, that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct which we may con­ sider either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind; that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable; and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the pre­ servation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct. The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed. It is, no doubt, extremely difficult even to conjecture by what gradations many struc­ tures have been perfected, more especially among broken and failing groups of organic beings; but we see so many strange gradations in nature that we ought to be extremely cautious in saying that any organ or instinct, or any whole being, could not have arrived at its present state by many graduated steps. There are, it must be admitted, cases of special difficulty on the theory of natural selection; and one of the most curious of these is the existence of two or three defined castes of workers or sterile females in the same community of ants ; but I have attempted to show how this diffi­ culty can be mastered. With respect to the almost universal sterility of species when first crossed, which �184 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES forms so remarkable a contrast with the almost universal fertility of varieties when crossed, I must refer the reader to the re­ capitulation of the facts given at the end of the eighth chapter, which seem to me con­ clusively to show that this sterility is no more a special endowment than is the in­ capacity of two trees to be grafted together; but that it is incidental on constitutional differences in the reproductive systems of the intercrossed species. We see the truth of this conclusion in the vast difference in the result, when the same two species are crossed reciprocally—that is, when one species is first used as the father and then as the mother. The fertility of varieties when intercrossed and of their mongrel offspring cannot be considered as universal; nor is their very general fertility surprising when we re­ member that it is not likely that either their constitutions or their reproductive systems should have been profoundly modified. Moreover, most of the varieties which have been experimentised on have been pro­ duced under domestication ;■ and as domesti­ cation (I do not mean mere confinement) apparently tends to eliminate sterility, we ought not to expect it also to produce sterility. The sterility of hybrids is a very different case from that of first crosses, for their repro­ ductive organs are more or less functionally impotent; whereas in first crosses the organs on both sides are in a perfect condition. As we continually see that organisms of all kinds are rendered in some degree sterile from their constitutions having been dis­ turbed by slightly different and new con­ ditions of life, we need not feel surprised at hybrids being in some degree sterile, for their constitutions can hardly fail to have been disturbed from being compounded of two distinct organisations. This parallelism is supported by another parallel, but directly opposite, class of facts—-namely, that the vigour and fertility of all organic beings are increased by slight changes in their conditions of life, and that the offspring of slightly modified forms or varieties acquire, from being crossed, increased vigour and fertility. So that, on the one hand, con­ siderable changes in the conditions of life and crosses between greatly modified forms lessen fertility; and, on the other hand, lesser changes in the conditions of life and crosses between less modified forms increase fertility. Turning to geographical distribution, the difficulties encountered on the theory of descent with modification are grave enough. All the individuals of the same species, and all the species of the same genus, or even higher group, must have descended from common parents; and therefore, in however distant and isolated parts of the world they are now found, they must, in the course of successive generations, have passed from some one part to the others. We are often wholly unable even to con­ jecture how this could have been effected. Yet, as we have reason to believe that some species have retained the same specific form for very long periods, enormously long as measured by years, too much stress ought not to be laid on the occasional wide diffusion of the same species; for during very long periods of time there will always have been a good chance for wide migration by many means. A broken or interrupted range may often be accounted for by the extinction of the species in the intermediate regions. It cannot be denied that we are as yet very ignorant of the full extent of the various climatal and geographical changes which have affected the earth during modern periods ; and such changes will obviously have greatly facilitated migration. As an example, I have attempted to show how potent has been the influence of the Glacial period on the distribution both of the same and of representative species throughout the world. We are as yet profoundly ignorant of the many occasional means of transport. With respect to distinct species of the same genus inhabiting very distant and isolated regions, as the process of modification has necessarily been slow, all the means of migration will have been possible during a very long period ; and, consequently, the difficulty of the wide diffusion of species * of the same genus is in some degree lessened. As on the theory of natural selection an interminable number of intermediate forms must have existed, linking together all the species in each group by gradations as fine as our present varieties, it maybe asked, Why do we not see these linking forms all around us ? Why are not all organic beings blended together in an inextricable chaos ? With respect to existing forms, we should remember that we have no right to expect (excepting in rare cases) to discover directly connecting-links between them, but only between each and some extinct and sup­ planted form. Even on a wide area, which has during’ a long period remained con­ tinuous, and of which the climate and other conditions of life change insensibly in going �RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION from a district occupied by one species into another district occupied by a closely-allied species, we have no just right to expect often to find intermediate varieties in the intermediate zone. For we have reason to believe that only a few species are under­ going change at any one period; and all changes are slowly effected. I have also shown that the intermediate varieties which will at first probably exist in the inter­ mediate zones will be liable to be supplanted by the allied forms on either hand ; and the latter, from existing in greater numbers, will generally be modified and improved at aquickerrate than the intermediate varieties, which exist in lesser numbers ; so that the intermediate varieties will, i i the long run, be supplanted and exterminated. On this doctrine of the extermination of an infinitude of connecting-links between the living and extinct inhabitants of the world, and at each successive period between the extinct and still older species, why is not every geological formation charg'ed with such links? Why does not every collec­ tion of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? We meet with no such evidence, and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory. Why, again, do whole groups of allied species appear, though certainly they often falsely appear, to have come in suddenly on the several geological stages ? Why do we not find great piles of strata beneath the Silurian system stored with the remains of the progenitors of the Silurian groups of fossils? For certainly, on my theory,'inch strata must somewhere have been deposited at these ancient and utterly unknown epochs in the world’s history. I can answer these questions and grave objections only on the supposition that the geological record is far more imperfect than most geologists believe. It cannot be objected that there has not been time suffi­ cient for any amount of organic change, for the lapse of time has been so great as to be utterly inappreciable by the human intellect. The number of specimens in all our museums is absolutely as nothing com­ pared with the countless generations of countless species which certainly have existed. We should not be able to recog­ nise a species as the parent of any one or more species, if we were to examine them ever so closely, unless we likewise pos­ sessed many of the intermediate links between their past or parent and present !85 states; and these many links we could hardly ever expect to discover, owing to the imperfection of the geological record. Numerous existing doubtful forms could be named which are probably varieties ; but who will pretend that in future ages so many fossil links will be discovered that naturalists will be able to decide, on the common view, whether or not these doubt­ ful forms are varieties ? As long as most of the links between any two species are un­ known, if any one link or intermediate variety be discovered, it will simply be classed as another and distinct species. Only a small portion of the world has been geologically explored. Only organic beings of certain classes can be preserved in a fossil condition, at least in any great number. Widely ranging species vary most, and varieties are often at first local —- both causes rendering the discovery of inter­ mediate links less likely. Local varie­ ties will not spread into other and distant regions until they are considerably modified and improved; and when they do spread, if discovered in a geological formation, they will appear as if suddenly created there, and will be simply classed as new species. Most formations have been intermittent in their accumulation ; and their duration, I am inclined to believe, has been shorter than the average duration of specific forms. Successive formations are separated from each other by enormous blank intervals of time; for fossiliferous formations, thick enough to resist future degradation, can be accumulated only where much sediment is deposited on the subsiding bed of the sea. During the alternate periods of elevation and of stationary level the record will be blank. During these latter periods there will probably be more variability in the forms of life; during periods of subsidence, more extinction. With respect to the absence of fossili­ ferous formations beneath the lowest Silurian strata, I can only recur to the hypothesis given in the ninth chapter. That the geological record is imperfect all will admit; but that it is imperfect to the degree which I require few will be inclined to admit. If we look to long enough inter­ vals of time, geology plainly declares that all species have changed; and they have changed in the manner which my theory requires, for they have changed slowly and in a graduated manner. We clearly see this in the fossil remains from consecutive formations invariably being much more closely related to each other than are the �186 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES fossils from formations distant from each other in time. Such is the sum of the several chief objections and difficulties which may justly be' urged against my theory; and I have now briefly recapitulated the answers and explanations which can be given to them. I have felt these difficulties far too heavily duri: g many years to doubt their weight. But it deserves especial notice that the more important objections relate to questions on which we are confessedly ignorant; nor do we know how ignorant we are. We do not know all the possible transitional gradations between the simplest and the most perfect organs ; it cannot be pretended that we know all the varied means of Distribution during the long lapse of years, or that we know how imperfect the Geological Record is. Grave as these several difficulties are, in my judgment they do not overthrow the theory of descent from a few created forms with subsequent modification. Now, let us turn to the other side of the argument. Under domestication we see much variability. This seems to be mainly due to the reproductive system being eminently susceptible to changes in the conditions of life; so that this system, when not rendered impotent, fails to reproduce offspring exactly like the parent-form. Variability is governed by many complex laws—by correlation of growth, by use and disuse, and by the direct action of the physical conditions of life. There is much difficulty in ascertaining how much modifi­ cation our domestic productions have under­ gone ; but we may safely infer that the amount has been large, and that modifi­ cations can be inherited for long periods. As long as the conditions of life remain the same, we have reason to believe that a modification which has already been in­ herited for many generations may continue to be inherited for an almost infinite number of generations. On the other hand, we have evidence that variability, when it has once come into play, does not wholly cease ; for new varieties are still occasionally pro­ duced by our most anciently domesticated productions. Man does not actually produce vari­ ability ; he only unintentionally exposes organic beings to new conditions of life, and then nature acts on the organisation, and causes variability. But man can and does select the variations given to him by nature, and thus accumulate them in any desired manner. He thus adapts animals and plants for his own benefit or pleasure. He may do this methodically, or he may do it unconsciously by preserving the in­ dividuals most useful to him at the time, without any thought of altering the breed. It is certain that he can largely influence the character of a breed by selecting, in each successive generation, individual dif­ ferences so slight as to be quite inappreci­ able by an uneducated eye. This process of selection has been the great agency in the production of the most distinct and useful domestic breeds. That many of the breeds produced by man have to a large extent the character of natural species is shown by the inextricable doubts whether very many of them are varieties or aboriginal species. There is no obvious reason why the principles which have acted so efficiently under domestication should not have acted under nature. In the preservation of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurrent Struggle for Existence, we see the most powerful and ever-acting means of selection. The struggle for exist­ ence inevitably follows from the high geo­ metrical ratio of increase which is common to all organic beings. This high rate of increase is proved by calculation—by the rapid increase of many animals and plants during a succession of peculiar seasons, or when naturalised in a new country. More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will deter­ mine which individual shall live and which shall die—which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct. As the individuals of the same species come in all respects into the closest competition with each other, the struggle will generally be most severe between them ; it will be almost equally severe between the varieties of the same species, and next in severity between the species of the same genus. But the struggle will often be very severe between beings most remote in the scale of nature. The slightest advantage in one being, at any age or during any season, over those with which it comes into com­ petition, or better adaptation in however slight a degree to the surrounding physical conditions, will turn the balance. With animals having separated sexes there will in most cases be a struggle between the males for possession of the females. The most vigorous individuals, or those which have most successfully struggled with their conditions of life, will �RECAPITULA TION AND CONCL USION generally leave most progeny. But success will often depend on having special weapons or means of defence, or on the charms of the males ; and the slightest advantage will lead to victory. As geology plainly proclaims that each land has undergone great physical changes, we might have expected that organic beings would have varied under nature, in the same way as they generally have varied under the changed conditions of domesti­ cation. And if there be any variability under nature, it would be an unaccountable fact if natural selection had not come into play. It has often been asserted, but the assertion is quite incapable of proof, that the amount of variation under nature is a strictly limited quantity. Man, though acting on external characters alone and often capriciously, can produce within a short period a great result by adding up mere individual differences in his domestic productions; and everyone admits that there are, at least, individual differences in species under nature. But, besides such differences, all naturalists have admitted the existence of varieties, which they think sufficiently distinct to be worthy of record in systematic works. No one can draw any clear distinction between individual differences and slight varieties, or between more plainly-marked varieties and sub­ species and species. Let it be observed how naturalists differ in the rank which they assign to the many representative forms in Europe and North America. If, then, we have under nature variability and a powerful agent always ready to act and select, why should we doubt that varia­ tions in any way useful to beings, under their excessively complex relations of life, would be preserved, accumulated, and inherited ? Why, if man can by patience select variations most useful to himself, should nature fail in selecting variations useful, under changing conditions of life, to her living products ? What limit can be put to this power, acting during long ages and rigidly scrutinising the whole constitu­ tion, structure, and habits of each creature —favouring the good and rejecting the bad ? I can see no limit to this power in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life. The theory of natural selection, even if we looked no further than this, seems to me to be in itself probable. 1 have already recapitulated, as fairly as I could, the opposed difficulties and objections ; now let us turn to the special facts and arguments in favour of the theory. 187 On the view that species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety, we can see why it is that no line of demarca­ tion can be drawn between species com­ monly supposed to have been produced by special acts of creation and varieties which are acknowledged to have been produced by secondary laws. On this same view, .we can understand how it is that in each region where many species of a genus have been produced, and where they now flourish, these same species should present many varieties; for where the manufactory of species has been active we might expect, as a general rule, to find it still in action ; and this is the case if varieties be incipient species. Moreover, the species of the larger genera which afford the greater number of varieties or incipient species retain to a certain degree the character of varieties; for they differ from each other by a less amount of difference than do the species of smaller genera. The closely-allied species also of the larger genera apparently have restricted ranges, and in their affinities they are clustered in little groups round other species—in which respects they resemble varieties. These are strange relations on the view of each species having been in­ dependently created, but are intelligible if all species first existed as varieties. As each species tends by its geometrical ratio of reproduction to increase inordinately in number; and as the modified descen­ dants of each species will be enabled to increase by so much the more as they become diversified in habits and structure, so as to be enabled to seize on many and widely-different places in the economy of nature, there will be a constant tendency in natural selection to preserve the most divergent offspring of any one species. Hence, during a long-continued course of modification, the slight differences, charac­ teristic of varieties of the same species, tend to be augmented into the greater differences characteristic of species of the same genus. New and improved varieties will inevitably supplant and exterminate the older, less improved, and intermediate varieties ; and thus species are rendered to a large extent defined and distinct objects. Dominant species belonging to the larger groups tend to give birth to new and dominant forms ; so that each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character. But as all groups cannot thus succeed in increasing in size, for the world would not �188 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES hold them, the more dominant groups beat the less dominant. This tendency in the large groups to go on increasing in size and diverging in character, together with the almost inevitable contingency of much extinction, explains the arrangement of all the forms of life, in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great classes, which we now see everywhere around us, and which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings seems to me utterly in­ explicable on the theory of creation. As natural selection acts solely by ac­ cumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification ; it can act only by very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of Natura nonfacit saltum,which every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to make truer, is, on this theory simply intelligible. We can plainly see why nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation. But why this should be a law of nature if each species has been independently created, no man can explain. Many other facts are, as it seems to me, explicable on this theory. How strange it is that a bird, under the form of wood­ pecker, should have been created to prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese, which never or rarely swim, should have been created with webbed feet; that a thrush should have been created to dive and feed on sub-aquatic insects; and that a petrel should have been created with habits and structure fitting it for the life of an auk or grebe; and so on in endless other cases. But on the view of each species constantly trying to increase in number, with natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place in nature, these facts cease to be strange, or perhaps might even have been anticipated. As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view sup­ posed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect, and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death ; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile’ sisters ; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees ; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars ; and at other such cases. The wonder, indeed, is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed. The complex and little-known laws governing variation are the same, as far • as we can see, with the laws which have governed the production of so-called specific forms. In both cases physical conditions seem to have produced but little direct effect; yet when varieties enter any zone they occasionally assume some of the characters of the species proper to that zone. In both varieties and species use and disuse seem to have produced some effect; for it is difficult to resist this con­ clusion when we look, for instance, at the logger-headed duck, which has wings incap­ able of flight, in nearly the same condition as in the domestic duck ; or when wre look at the burrowing tucutucu, which is occa­ sionally blind, and then at certain moles, which are habitually blind and have their eyes covered with skin ; or when we look at the blind animals inhabiting the dark caves of America and Europe. In both varieties and species correlation of growth seems to have played a most important part, so that, when one part has been modi­ fied, other parts are necessarily modified. In both varieties and species reversions to long-lost characters occur. How inexplic­ able, on the theory of creation, is the occa­ sional appearance of stripes on the s'houlder and legs of the several species of the horse­ genus and in their hybrids ! How simply is this fact explained if we believe that these species have descended from a striped pro­ genitor, in the same manner as the several domestic breeds of pigeon have descended from the blue and barred rock-pigeon 1 On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, why should the specific characters, or those by which the species of the same genus differ from each other, be more variable than the generic characters in which they all agree? Why, for instance, should the colour of a flower be more likely to vary in any one species of a genus if the other species, supposed to have been created inde­ pendently, have differently coloured flowers, �RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION than if all the species of the genus have the same coloured flowers ? If species are only well-marked varieties, of which the characters have become in a high degree permanent, we can understand this fact; for they have already varied since they branched off from a common progenitor in certain characters, by which they have come to be specifically distinct from each other; and, therefore, these same char­ acters would be more likely still to be variable than the generic characters which have been inherited without change for an enormous period. It is inexplicable, on the theory of creation, why a part developed in a very unusual manner in any one species of a genus, and therefore, as we may naturally infer, of great importance to the species, should be eminently liable to variation ; but, on my view, this part has undergone, since the several species branched off from a common progenitor, an unusual amount of variability and modi­ fication, and, therefore, we might expect this part generally to be still variable. But a part may be developed in the most unusual manner, like the wing of a bat, and yet not be more variable than any other structure, if the part be common to many subordinate forms—that is, if it has been inherited for a very long period ; for in this case it will have been rendered con­ stant by long-continued natural selection. Glancing at instincts, marvellous as some are, they offer no greater difficulty than does corporeal structure on the theory of the natural selection of successive,slight, but pro­ fitable modifications. We can thus under­ stand why nature moves by graduated steps in endowing different animals of the same class with their several instincts. I have attempted to show how much light the principle of gradation throws on the admir­ able architectural powers of the hive-bee. Habit, no doubt, sometimes comes into play in modifying instincts ; but it certainly is not indispensable, as we see, in the case of neuter insects, which leave no progeny to inherit the effects of long-continued habit. On the view of all the species of the same genus having descended from a common parent, and having inherited much in common, we can understand how it is that allied species, when placed under con­ siderably different conditions of life, yet should follow nearly the same instincts ; why the thrush of South America, for instance, lines her nest with mud like our British species. On the view of instincts having been slowly acquired through natural 189 selection, we need not marvel at some instincts being apparently not perfect and liable to mistakes, and at many instincts causing other animals to suffer. If species be only well-marked and per­ manent varieties, we can at once see why their crossed offspring should follow the same complex laws in their degrees and kinds of resemblance to their parents—in being absorbed into each other by succes­ sive crosses, and in other such points—as do the crossed offspring of acknowledged varieties. On the other hand, these would be strange facts if species have been inde­ pendently created and varieties have been produced by secondary laws. If we admit that the geological record is imperfect in an extreme degree, then such facts as the record gives support the theory of descent with modification. New species have come on the stage slowly and at successive intervals ; and the amount of change, after equal intervals of time, is widely different in different groups. The extinction of species and of whole groups of species, which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of the organic world, almost inevitably follows on the principle of natural selection ; for old forms will be supplanted by new and improved forms. Neither single species nor groups of species reappear when the chain of ordinary genera­ tion has once been broken. The gradual diffusion of dominant forms, with the slow modification of their descendants, causes the forms of life, after long intervals of time, to appear as if they had changed simultaneously throughout the world. The fact of the fossil remains of each formation being in some degree intermediate in char­ acter between the fossils in the formations above and below is simply explained by their intermediate position in the chain of descent. The grand fact that all extinct organic beings belong to the same system with recent beings, falling either into the same or into intermediate groups, follows from the living and the extinct being the offspring of common parents. As the groups which have descended from an ancient progenitor have generally diverged in character, the progenitor with its early descendants will often be intermediate in character in comparison with its later descendants ; and thus we can see why the more ancient a fossil is, the oftener it stands in some degree intermediate between existing and allied groups. Recent forms are generally looked at as being, in some vague sense, higher than ancient and �190 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES extinct forms; and they are in so far higher as the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved organic beings in the struggle for life. Lastly, the law of the long endur­ ance of allied forms on the same continent —of marsupials in Australia, of edentata in America, and other such cases—is intel­ ligible, for within a confined country the recent and the extinct will naturally be allied by descent. Looking to geographical distribution, if we admit that there has been during the long course of ages much migration from one part of the world to another, owing to former climatal and geographical changes and to the many occasional and unknown means of dispersal, then we can understand, on the theory of descent with modification, most of the great leading facts in Distribu­ tion. We can see why there should be so striking a parallelism in the distribution of organic beings throughout space, and in their geological succession throughout time; for in both cases the beings have been con­ nected by the bond of ordinary generation, and the means of modification have been the same. We see the full meaning of the wonderful fact, which must have struck every traveller—namely, that on the same continent, under the most diverse condi­ tions, under heat and cold, on mountain and lowland, on deserts and marshes, most of the inhabitants within each great class are plainly related ; for they will generally be descendants of the same progenitors and early colonists. On this same principle of former migration, combined in most cases with modification, we can understand, by the aid of the Glacial period, the identity of some few plants, and the close alliance of many others, on the most distant moun­ tains, under the most different climates ; and likewise the close alliance of some of the inhabitants of the sea in the northern and southern temperate zones, though separated by the whole intertropical ocean. Although two areas may present the same physical conditions of life, we need feel no surprise at their inhabitants being widely different, if they have. been for a long period completely separated from each other; for as the relation of organism to organism is the most important of all rela­ tions, and as the two areas will have received colonists from some third source or from each other, at various periods and in different proportions, the course of modi­ fication in the two areas will inevitably be different. On this view of migration, with subse­ quent modification, we can see why oceanic islands should be inhabited by few species, but of these that many should be peculiar; We can see clearly why those animals which cannot cross wide spaces of ocean, as frogs and terrestrial mammals, should not inhabit oceanic islands ; and why, on the other hand, new and peculiar species of bats which can traverse the ocean should so often be found on islands far distant from any continent. Such facts as the presence of peculiar species of bats, and the absence of all other mammals, on oceanic islands, are utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation. The existence of closely-allied or repre­ sentative species in any two areas implies, on the theory of descent with modification, that the same parents formerly inhabited both areas ; and we almost invariably find that, wherever many closely-allied species inhabit two areas, some identical species common to both still exist. Wherever many closely-allied yet distinct species occur, many doubtful forms and varieties of the same species likewise occur. It is a rule of high generality that the inhabitants of each area are related to the inhabitants of the nearest source whence immigrants might have been derived. We see this in nearly all the plants and animals of the Galapagos Archipelago, of Juan Fernandez, and of the other American islands being related in the most striking manner to the plants and animals of the neighbouring American mainland; and those of the Cape de Verde Archipelago and other African islands to the African mainland. It must be admitted that these facts receive no explanation on the theory of creation. The fact, as we have seen, that all past and present organic beings constitute one grand natural system, with group sub­ ordinate to group, and with extinct groups often falling in between recent groups, is intelligible on the theory of natural selec­ tion with its contingencies of extinction and divergence of character. On these same principles we see how it is that the mutual affinities of the species and genera within each class are so complex and circuitous. We see why certain characters are far more serviceable than others for classifi­ cation—why adaptive characters, though of paramount importance to the being, are of hardly any importance in classification ; why characters derived from rudimentary parts, though of no service to the being, are often of high classificatory value ; and �1 RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION fl# i-sv 103 fisfl id} m jfli ma ila ati ®ia wz ah ns. :rb -s to 1.0 JS Wf cm Id u, id, $ U 191 x at corresponding ages, have been inherited why embryological characters are the most from a remote period to the present day. valuable of all. The real affinities of all On the view of each organic being and organic beings are due to inheritance or each separate organ having been specially community of descent. The natural system created, how utterly inexplicable it is that is a genealogical arrangement, in which we parts, like the teeth in the embryonic calf have to discover the lines of descent by the or like the shrivelled wings under the most permanent characters, however slight soldered wing-covers of some beetles, should their vital importance may be. thus so frequently bear the plain stamp of The framework of bones being the same inutility! Nature may be said to have in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of taken pains to reveal, by rudimentary organs the porpoise, and leg of the horse; the and by homologous structure, her scheme same number of vertebrae forming the neck of modification, which it seems that we of the giraffe and of the elephant; and wilfully will not understand. innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descept I have now recapitulated the chief facts with slow and slight successive modifraB and considerations which have thoroughly tions. The similarity of pattern in the wing convinced me that species have been modi­ and leg of a bat, though used for such fied, during a long course of descent, by different purpose—in the jaws and legs of the preservation or the natural selection of a crab, in the petals, stamens, and pistils many successive slight favourable varia­ of a flower—is likewise intelligible on t^e tions. I cannot believe that a false theory view of the gradual modification of parts or would explain, as it seems to me that the organs, which were alike in the early pro­ theory of natural selection does explain, genitor of each class. On the principle of the several large classes of facts above successive variations not always super­ specified. I see no good reason why the vening at an early age, and being inherited views given in this volume should shock at a corresponding not early period of life, the religious feelings of any one. A cele­ we can clearly see why the embryos of brated author and divine has written to me mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes should that “ he has gradually learnt to see that it be so closely alike, and should be so unlike is just as noble a conception of the Deity the adult forms. We may cease marvelling at the embryo of an air-breathing mammal ' to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other or bird having branchial slits and arteries and needful forms as to believe that He re­ running in loops, like those in a fish which quired a fresh act of creation to supply the has to breathe the air dissolved in water voids caused by the action of His laws.” by the aid of well-developed branchiae. Why, it may be asked, have all the most . Disuse, aided sometimes by natural selec­ eminent living naturalists and geologists tion, will often tend to reduce an organ rejected this view of the mutability of when, it has become useless by changed species ? It cannot be asserted that organic habits or under changed conditions of life ; beings in a state of nature are subject to and we can clearly understand on this view no variation ; it cannot be proved that the the meaning of rudimentary organs. But amount of variation in the course of long disuse and selection will generally act on ages is a limited quantity ; no clear dis­ each creature when it has come to maturity tinction has been, or can be, drawn between and has to play its full part in the struggle for species and well-marked varieties. ‘It can­ existence, and will thus have little power of not be maintained that species when inter­ acting on an organ during early life; hence crossed are invariably sterile and varieties the organ will not be much reduced or ren­ invariably fertile; or that sterility is a dered rudimentary at this early age. The special endowment and sign of creation. calf, for instance, has inherited teeth, which The belief that species were immutable never cut through the gums of the upper productions was almost unavoidable as long jaw, from an early progenitor having wellas the history of the world was thought to developed teeth ; and we may believe that be of short duration; and now that we have the teeth in the mature animal were reduced, acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we during successive generations, by disuse or are too apt to assume, without proof, that by the tongue and palate having been better the geological record is so perfect that it fitted by natural selection to browse without would have afforded us plain evidence of their aid ; whereas in the calf the teeth the mutation of species, if they had under­ have been left untouched by selection or gone mutation. disuse, and, on the principle of inheritance Jp’. ■A;rS MM Sb & �192 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES But the chief cause of our natural unwil­ lingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the inter­ mediate steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed and great valleys excavated by the slow action of the coast­ waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years ; it cannot add up and per­ ceive the full effects of many slight varia­ tions, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations. Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “ plan of creation,” “ unity of design,” etc., and to think that we give an explana­ tion when we only restate a fact. Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this .volume ; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscien­ tiously expressing his conviction ; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed. Several eminent naturalists have of late published their belief that a multitude of reputed species in each genus are not real species, but that' other species are real—that is, have been independently created. This seems to me a strange conclusion to arrive at. They admit that a multitude of forms which till lately they themselves thought were special creations, and which are still thus looked at by the majority of naturalists, and which consequently have every external characteristic feature of true species—they admit that these have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other and very slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth’s history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as fullgrown ? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother’s womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence. It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we may consider, by so much the arguments fall away in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of whole classes can be con­ nected together by chains of affinities, and all can be classified on the same principle, in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill up very wide intervals between existing orders. Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed state ; and this, in some instances, necessarily implies an enormous amount of modification in the descendants. Throughout whole classes various struc­ tures are formed on the same pattern, and at an embryonic age the species closely resemble each other. Therefore, I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modi­ fication embraces all the members of'the same class. I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further —namely, to the belief that all animals and �RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION plants have descended from some one pro­ totype. But analogy may be a deceitful •guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common, in their chemical compo­ sition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular Structure, and their laws of growth and re­ production. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals ; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore, I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator. When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace in the Linnean Journal, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be in essence a species. This I feel sure, and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty Species of British brambles are true species will cease. Systematists will have only to decide (not that this will be easy) whether any form be sufficiently constant and dis­ tinct from other forms to be capable of definition ; and, if definable, whether the differences be sufficiently important to deserve a specific name. This latter point will become a far more essential considera­ tion than it is at present; for differences, however slight, between any two forms, if not blended by intermediate gradations, are looked at by most naturalists as sufficient to raise both forms to the rank of species. ’Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknow­ ledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is that the latter are known, or believed, to be con­ nected at the present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected. Hence, without rejecting the consideration of the present existence of intermediate gradations between any WO forms, we shall be led to weigh more carefully and to value higher the actual amount of difference between them. It is quite possible that forms now generally acknowledged to be merely varieties may hereafter be thought worthy of specific 193 names, as with the primrose and cowslip ; and in this case scientific and common language will come into accordance. In short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for conveni­ ence. This may not be a cheering pro­ spect ; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species. The other and more general departments of natural history will rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimen­ tary and aborted organs, etc., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension ; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the sum­ ming-up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing-up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen ; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting—-I speak from experience— will the study of natural history become ! A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth. The study of domestic productions will rise immensely in value. A new variety raised by man will be a more important and interesting subject for study than one more species added to the infinitude of already recorded species. Our classifica­ tions will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies, and will then truly give what may be called the plan of crea­ tion. The rules for classifying will, no doubt, become simpler when we have a definite object in view. We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings ; and we have to discover and trace the many diverg­ ing lines of descent in our natural gene­ alogies by characters of any kind which have long been inherited. Rudimentary organs will speak infallibly with respect to the nature of long-lost structures. Species and groups of species which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be O �194 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES called living fossils, will aid us in forming i remain for a long period unchanged, while a picture of the ancient forms of life. ' . within this same period several of these Embryology will reveal to us the structure, species, by migrating into new countries in some degree obscured, of the prototypes and coming into competition with foreign of each great class. associates, might become modified; so that When we can feel assured that all the we must not overrate the accuracy of individuals of the same species, and all the organic change as a measure of time. closely-allied species of most genera, have During early periods of the earth’s history, within a not very remote period descended when the forms of life were probably fewer from one parent, and have migrated from and simpler, the rate of change was probsome one birth-place ; and when we better ! ably slower; and at the first dawn of life, know the many means of migration, then, i when very few forms of the simplest strucby the light which geology now throws, j ture existed, the rate of change may have and will continue to throw, on former ■ been slow in an extreme degree. The whole changes of climate and of the level of the history of the world, as at present known, land, we shall surely be enabled to trace although of a length quite incomprehensible in an admirable manner the former migra­ by us, will hereafter be recognised as a mere tions of the inhabitants of the whole world. fragment of time, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first creature, Even at present, by comparing the dif­ the progenitor of innumerable extinct and ferences of the inhabitants of the sea on living descendants, was created. the opposite sides of a continent, and the In the distant future I see open fields for nature of the various inhabitants of that far more important researches. Psychology continent in relation to their apparent will be based on a new foundation, that of means of immigration, some light can be the necessary acquirement of each mental thrown on ancient geography. power and capacity by gradation. Light The noble science of geology loses glory will be thrown on the origin of man and from the extreme imperfection of the record. his history. The crust of the earth, with its embedded Authors of the highest eminence seem to remains, must not be looked at as a well- i be fully satisfied with the view that each filled museum, but as a poor collection species has been independently created. made at hazard and at rare intervals. The To my mind, it accords better with what we accumulation of each great fossiliferous know of the laws impressed on matter by formation will be recognised as having the Creator that the production and extinc­ depended on an unusual concurrence of tion of the past and present inhabitants of circumstances, and the blank intervals the world should have been due to secondary between the successive stages as having causes, like those determining the birth and been of vast duration. But we shall be death of the individual. When I view all able to gauge with some security the beings not as special creations, but as the duration of these intervals by a com­ lineal descendants of some few beings parison of- the preceding and succeeding which lived long before the first bed of the organic forms. We must be cautious in Silurian system was deposited, they seem attempting to correlate as strictly contem­ to me to become ennobled. Judging from poraneous two formations, which include the past, we may safely infer that not one few identical species, by the general suc­ living species will transmit its unaltered cession of their forms of life. As species likeness to a distant futurity. And of the are produced and exterminated by slowly species now living very few will transmit acting and still existing causes, and not by progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; miraculous acts of creation and by catastro­ for the manner in which all organic beings phes; and as themost important of all causes are grouped shows that the greater number of organic change is one which is almost of species of each genus, and all the species independent of altered, and perhaps sud­ of many genera, have left no descendants, denly altered, physical conditions—namely, but have become utterly extinct. We can the mutual relation of organism to organism, the improvement of one being entailing I so far take a prophetic glance into futurity the improvement or the extermination of ; as to foretell that it will be the common others—it follows that the amount of organic I and widely-spread species, belonging to change in the fossils of consecutive forma­ ‘ the larger and dominant groups, which will tions probably serves as a fair measure of I ultimately prevail and procreate new and the lapse of actual time. A number of j dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those species, however, keeping in a body might �RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION 195 which lived long before the Silurian epoch, | with Reproduction ; Inheritance, which is ralmost implied by reproduction; Variability, )■ s we may feel certain that the ordinary suc­ IQ3 rad >fii pa an 4r itn o.) kid 4.1. ip ijp .■ $ Is) cession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. It is interesting to contemplate an en­ tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse ; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a con­ sequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving—namely, the production of the higher animals—directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning end­ less forms most beautiful and most wonder­ ful have been, and are being, evolved. �INDEX Aberrant groups, 172 Abyssinia, plants of, 151 Acclimatisation, 61 Affinities of extinct species, 133 ’------ of organic beings, 165 Agassiz on Amblyopsis, 61 ------ on groups of species suddenly appearing, 123-4 ------ on embryological succession, 137 •----- on the glacial period, 148 ----- - on embryological characters, 168 ------ on the embryos of vertebrata, 175 ------ on parallelism of embryological develop­ ment and geological succession, 180 Algae of New Zealand, 151 Alligators, males, fighting, 42 Amblyopsis, blind fish, 61 America, North, productions allied to those of Europe, 150 ------- ---- - boulders and glaciers of, 150 ------ South, no modern formations on west coast, 119 Ammonites, sudden extinction of, 131 Anagallis, sterility of, 103 Analogy of variations, 69 Ancylus, 155 Animals, not domesticated from being variable, 15 ------ domestic, descended from several stocks, 15 ------ acclimatisation of, 62 ------ of Australia, 52-3 ----- - with thicker fur in cold climates, 59 ------blind, in caves, 60 ------ extinct, of Australia, 137 Anomma, 100 Antarctic islands, ancient flora of, 160 Antirrhinum, 70 Ants attending aphides, 88 ------ slave-making instinct, 92 ------ neuter, structure of, 98 Aphides, attended by ants, 88 Aphis, development of, 177 Apteryx, 77 Arab horses, 22 Aralo-Caspian Sea, 137 Archiac, M. de, on the succession of species, 132 Artichoke, Jerusalem, 62 Ascension, plants of, 157 Asclepias, pollen of, 82 Asparagus, 145 Aspicarpa, 167 Asses, striped, 70 Ateuchus, 60 Audubon on habits of frigate-bird, 79 Audubon on variation in birds’-nests, 89 ------ on heron eating seeds, 156 Australia, animals of, 52-3 ------ dogs of, 90 ------ extinct animals of, 137 ------ European plants in, 151 Azara on flies destroying cattle, 36 Azores, flora of, 147 Babington, Mr., on British plants, 27 Balancement of growth, 64 Bamboo with hooks, 83 Barberry, flowers of, 46 Barrande, M., on Silurian colonies, 128 ------ on the succession of species, 132 ------ on parallelism of palaeozoic formations, 133 ------on affinities of ancient species, 134 Barriers, importance of, 141 Batrachians on islands, 158 Bats, how structure acquired, 77 ------ distribution of, 159 Bear catching water-insects, 78 Bee, sting of, 85 ------queen, killing rivals, 85 Bees fertilising flowers, 37 ------hive, not sucking the red clover, 44 ------ hive, cell-making instinct, 94 ------ humble, cells of, 94 ------parasitic, 91 Beetles, wingless, in Madeira, 60 ------ with deficient tarsi, 60 Bentham, Mr., on British plants, 27 ------ on classification, 168 Berkeley, Mr., on seeds in salt-water, 145 Bermuda, birds of, 157 Birds acquiring fear, 89 ------annually cross the Atlantic, 147 ------ colour of, on continents, 59 —— footsteps and remains of, in secondary rocks, 124 —— fossil, in caves of Brazil, 137 ------ of Madeira, Bermuda, and Galapagos, 157 ------ song of males, 42 ------ transporting seeds, 146 ----- - waders, 155 ------wingless, 59, 77 •----- - with traces of embryonic teeth, 180 Bizcacha, 141 ------ affinities of, 172 Bladder for swimming in fish, 81 Blindness of cave animals, 60 Blyth, Mr., on distinctness of Indian cattle, 15 ------ on striped Hemionus, 70 �INDEX Bly th, Mr., on crossed geese, 105 Boar, shoulder-pad of, 42 Borrow, Mr., on the Spanish pointer, 22 Bory St. Vincent on Batrachians, 158 Bosquet, M,t on fossil Chthamalus, 124 Boulders, erratic, on the Azores, 147 Bran chi®, 81 Brent, Mr., on house-tumblers, 90 ----- on hawks killing pigeons, 146 Brewer, Dr., on American cuckoo, 91 Britain, mammals of, 159 Bronn on duration of specific forms, 120 Brown, Robert, on classification, 167 Buckman on variation in plants, 12 Buzareingues on sterility of varieties, ill Cabbag®, varieties of, crossed, 46 Calceolaria, 104 Canary-birds, sterility of hybrids, 105 Cape de Verde Islands, 160 Cape of Good Hope, plants of, 50, 151 Carrier-pigeons killed by hawks, 146 Cassini on flowers of composite, 63 Catasetum, 170 Cats, with blue eyes, deaf, 13 ----- variation in habits of, 43 ------curling tail when-going to spring, 85 Cattle destroying fir-trees, 36 ------destroyed by flies in Paraguay, 36 ------breeds of, locally extinct, 50 ------ fertility of Indian and European breeds, 105 Cave, inhabitants of, blind, 60 Centres of creation, 142 Cephalopoda:, development of, 177 Cervulus, 105 Cetacea, teeth and hair, 63 Ceylon, plants of, 151 Chalk formation, 131 Characters, divergence of, 51 ------ sexual, variable, 73 ------ adaptive or analogical, 171 Charlock, 38 Checks to increase, 34 ------ mutual, 36 Chickens, instinctive tameness of, 90 Chthamalinae, 118 Chthamalus, cretacean species of, 124 Circumstances favourable to selection of domestic products, 24 ----- to natural selection, 47 Cirripedes capable of crossing, 47 carapace aborted, 65 their ovigerous frena, 81 fossil, 124 ------larvae of, 176 Classification, 165 Clift, Mr., on the succession of types, 137 Climate, effects of, in checking increase of beings, 35 . . ------ adaptation of, to organisms, 01 Cobites, intestine of, 80 Cockroach, 38 Collections, palaeontological, poor, 118 Colour, influenced by climate, 59 in relation to attacks by flies, 84 i 197 Columba livia, parent of domestic pigeons, 17 Colymbetes, 155 Compensation of growth, 64 Composite, outer and inner florets of, 63 ------ male flowers of, 180 Conclusion, general, 191 Conditions, slight changes in, favourable to fertility, no Coot, 79 Coral-islands, seeds drifted to, 146 ------ reefs, indicating movements of earth, 126 Corn-crake, 79 Correlation of growth in domestic productions, 12-13 ■------of growth, 63, 84 Cowslip, 27 Creation, single centres of, 142 Crinum, 104 Crosses, reciprocal, 107 Crossing of domestic animals, importance in altering breeds, 15-16 ------ advantages of, 45 Crustacea of New Zealand, 151 Crustacean, blind, 61 Cryptocerus, 99 Ctenomys, blind, 60 Cuckoo, instinct of, 91 Currants, grafts of, 108 Currents of sea, rate of, 145 Cuvier on conditions of existence, 87 ------ on fossil monkeys, 124 ------ Fred., on instinct, 87 Dana, Prof., on blind cave-animals, 61 ------ on relations of crustaceans of Japan, 150 ------ on crustaceans of New Zealand, 151 De Candolle on struggle for existence, 32 ------ on umbelliferae, 64 ------ on general affinities, 172 ------ Alph., on low plants, widely dispersed, 163 ------ on widely ranging plants being variable, 29 ------ on naturalisation, 52 ------on winged seeds, 64 ------on Alpine species suddenly becoming rare,75 ------ on distribution of plants with large seeds, 146 ----- - on vegetation of Australia, 153 ------ on fresh-water plants, 155 ------ on insular plants, 157 Degradation of coast-rocks, 116 Denudation, rate of, 117 ------ of oldest rocks, 125 Development of ancient forms, 136 Devonian system, 135 Dianthus, fertility of crosses, 106 Dirt on feet of birds, 146 Dispersal, means of, 144 ------ during glacial periods, 147 Distribution, geographical, 140 ----- means of, 144 Disuse, effects of, under nature, 59 Divergence of character, 51 Division, physiological, of labour, 52 Dogs, hairless, with imperfect teeth, 1 ------ descended from several wild stocks, 15 ------ domestic instincts of, 90 i % Jg5c*i i w £ �j 98 INDEX Dogs, inherited civilisation of, 90 ------ fertility of breeds together, 105 ------of crosses, 110-11 ------ proportions of, when young, 178 Domestication, variation under, 11 Downing, Mr., on fruit trees in America, 41 Downs, North and South, 117 Dragon-flies, intestines of, 80 Drift timber, 146 Driver-ant, 100 Drones killed by other bees, 85 Duck, domestic, wings of, reduced, 12 ------ logger-headed, 77 Duckweed, 155 Dugong, affinities of, 166 Dung-beetles with deficient tarsi, 60 Dyticus, 155 Earl, Mr. W., on the Malay Archipelago, 159 Ears, drooping, in domestic animals, 12 ------ rudimentary, 181 Earth, seeds in roots of trees, 146 Eciton, 99 Economy of organisation, 64 .Edentata, teeth and hair, 63 ------ fossil species of, 138 Edwards, Milne, on physiological divisions of labour, 52 ------ on gradations of structure, 82 ------ on embryological characters, 168 Eggs, young birds escaping from. 42 Electric organs, 82 •Elephant, rate of increase, 33 ------ of glacial period, 62 Embryology, 175 Existence, struggle for, 31 ------ conditions of, 87 Extinction, as bearing on natural selection, 50 ------ of domestic, varieties, 51 —— 129 Eye, structure of, 79 ------ correction for aberration, 85 Eyes reduced in moles, 60 Fishes, ganoid, now confined to fresh water, 49 • ----- electric organs of, 82 ------ ganoid, living in fresh water, 131 ------of southern hemisphere, 151 Flight, powers of, how acquired, 78 Flowers, structure of, in relation to crossing, 43 —— of composite and umbelliferae, 63 Forbes, E., on colours of shells, 58 ----- - on abrupt range of shells in depth, 75 ----- - on poorness of palceontological collections 118 ------on continuous succession of genera, 129 ------ on continental extensions, 144 ------ on distribution during glacial period, 148 ------ on parallelism in time and space, 164 Forests, changes in, in America, 37 Formation, Devonian, 135 Formations, thickness of, in Britain, 116 ----- - intermittent, 123 Formica rufescens, 92 ----- -sanguinea, 92 ------ flava, neuter of, ioo Frena, ovigerous, of cirripedes, 81 Fresh-water productions, dispersal of, 154 Fries on species in large genera being closely allied to other speoies, 30 Frigate-bird, 79 Frogs on islands, 158 Fruit-trees, gradual improvement of, 22 ------ in United States, 41 ------varieties of, acclimatised in United States, 62 Fuci, crossed, 107 Fur, thicker in cold climates, 59 Furze, 176 Galapagos Archipelago, birds of, 157 ------productions of, 160-1 Galeopithecus, 77 Game, increase of, checked by vermin, 34.-5 Gartner on sterility of hybrids, 102-3 ------ on reciprocal crosses, 107 ------ on crossed maize and verbascum, hi • ----- on comparison of hybrids and mongrels, 112 Geese, fertility when crossed, 105 Fabre, M., on parasitic sphex, 92 ------upland, 79 Falconer, Dr., on naturalisation of plants in Genealogy important in classification, 168 India, 33 Geoffroy St. Hilaire on balancement, 64 ------ on fossil crocodile, 127 ■----- on homologous organs, 174 ------ on elephantsand mastodons, 136 ------Isidore, on variability of repeated parts, 65 •---- - and Cautley on mammals of sub-Himalavan I ------ on correlation in monstrosities, 12-13 beds, 138 . ------on correlation, 63 Falkland Island, wolf of, 158 ------ on variable parts being often monstrous, 67 Geographical distribution, 140 Faults, 117 Faunas, marine, 141 Geography, ancient, 194 Fear, instinctive, in birds, 89 Geology, future progress of, 194 Feet of birds, young molluscs adhering to, 155 ------imperfection of the record, 114 Fertility of hybrids, 103 Giraffe, tail of, 82 ----- from slight changes in conditions, no Glacial period, 147 ------ of crossed varieties, no Gmelin on distribution, 148 Fir-trees destroyed by cattle, 36 Gnathod on, fossil, 149 ------pollen of, 85 Godwin-Austen, Mr., on the Malay Archi­ Fish, flying, 78 pelago, 122 ------ teleostean, sudden appearance of, 124 Goethe on compensation of growth, 64 ■----- eating seeds, 146, 156 Gooseberry, grafts of, 108 ------ fresh-water, distribution of, 154 Gould, Dr. A., on land-shells, 159 �INDEX Gould, Mr., on colours of birds, 59 ------ on birds of the Galapagos, 160 ------ on distribution of genera of birds, 162 Gourds, crossed, in Grafts, capacity of, 108 Grasses, varieties of, 51-2 Gray, Dr. Asa, on trees of United States, 46 :----- on naturalised plants in the United States, 52 — on rarity of intermediate varieties, 75 —— on Alpine plants, 148 —- Dr. J. E., on striped mule, 71 Grebe, 79 Groups, aberrant, 172 Grouse, colours of, 41 —— red, a doubtful species, 27 Growth, compensation of, 64 ------ correlation of, in domestic products, 12-13 ------ correlation of, 63 Habit, effect of, under domestication, 12 ------ effect of, under nature, 59 ------ diversified, of same species, 78 Hair and teeth, correlated, 63 Harcourt, Mr. E. V., on the birds of Madeira, 157 Hartung, M., on boulders in the Azores, 147 Hazel-nuts, 145 Hearne on habits of bears, 78 Heath, changes in vegetation, 36 Heer, O., on plants of Madeira, 49 Helix pomatia, 160 Helosciadium, 145 Hemionus, striped, 71 Herbert, W., on struggle for existence, 32 —— on sterility of hybrids, 103 Hermaphrodites crossing, 45 Heron eating seed, 156 Heron, Sir R., on peacocks, 42 Heusinger on white animals not poisoned by certain plants, 13 Hewitt, Mr., on sterility of first crosses, 109 Himalaya, glaciers of, 150 ------ plants of, 151 Hippeastrum, 104 Holly-trees, sexes of, 44 Hollyhock, varieties of, crossed, 111-2 Hooker, Dr., on trees of New Zealand, 46 —*— on-acclimatisation of Himalayan trees, 62 ■ ----- on flowers of umbelliferce, 63 -—- on glaciers of Himalaya, 150 ■ ----- on alga; of New Zealand, 151 ---- - on vegetation atthebaseof the Himalaya, 152. ■—— on plants of Tierra del Fuego, 131-2 ------ on Australian plants, 151, 160 ----- - on relations of flora of South America, 152-3 —on flora of the Antarctic lands, 153, 160 ------ on the plants of the Galapagos, 158, 160 Hooks on bamboos, 83 ------ to seeds on islands, 158 Horner, Mr., on the antiquity of Egyptians, 15 Horns, rudimentary, 181 Horse, fossil, in La Plata, 129 Horses destroyed by flies in Paraguay, 36 ——striped, 71 ------ proportions of, when young, 178 Horticulturists, selection applied by, 20-1 199 Huber on cells of bees, 96 ------P., on reason blended with instinct, 88 ' ------ on habitual nature of instincts, 88 ------ on slave-making ants, 92 ----- - on Melipona domestica, 94 Humble-bees, cells of, 94 Hunter, J., on secondary sexual characters, 66 Hutton, Captain, on crossed geese, 105 Huxley, Prof., on structure ofhermaphrodites,'47 ------ on embryological succession, 137 ----- - on homologous organs, 175 ------ on the development of aphis, 177 Hybrids and mongrels compared, 112 Hybridism, 112 Hydra, structure of, 80 Ibla, 65 Icebergs transporting seeds, 147 Increase, rate of, 33 Individuals, numbers favourable to selection, 47 • ----- many, whether simultaneously created, 144 Inheritance, laws of, 13 ------at corresponding ages, 13, 41 _ Insects, colour of, fitted for habitations, 41 ----- sea-side, colours of, 59 ------ blind in caves, 61 ------luminous, 82 • ----- neuter, 98 Instinct, 87 Instincts, domestic, 90 Intercrossing, advantages of, 45 Islands, oceanic, 156 Isolation favourable to selection, 48 Japan, productions of, 150 Java, plants of, 151 Jones, Mr. J. M., on the birds of Bermuda, 157 Jussieu on classification, 167 • Kentucky, caves of, 60-1 ICerguelen-land, flora of, 153s *6o Kidney-bean, acclimatisation of, 62 Kidneys of birds, 63 Kirby on tarsi deficient in beetles, 60 Knight, Andrew, on cause of variation, 11 Kolreuter on the barberry, 46 ------ on sterility of hybrids, 102 ------on reciprocal crosses, 107 ------ on crossed varieties of nicotiana, 112 ------on crossing male and hermaphrodite flowers, 180 Lamarck, on adaptive characters, 171 Land-shells, distribution of, 159 ------ of Madeira, naturalised, 162 Languages, classification of, 169 Lapse, great, of time, 116 Larvte, 175 Laurel, nectar secreted by the leaves, 43 Laws of variation, 58 Leech, varieties of, 37 Leguminosm, nectar secreted by glands, 43 Lepidosiren, 49, 134 Life, struggle for, 31 Lingula, Silurian, 125 �200 INDEX Linnaeus, aphorism of, 167 Lion, mane of, 42 ------ young of, striped, 176 Lobelia fulgens, 36 Lobelia, sterility of crosses, 104 Loess of the Rhine, 155 Lowness ofstructure connected with variability, 65 Lowness, related to wide distribution, 163 Lubbock, Mr., on the nerves of coccus, 26 Lucas, Dr. P., on inheritance, 13 ------ on resemblance of child to parent, 113 Lund and Clausen on fossils of Brazil, 137 Lyell, Sir C., on the struggle for existence, 32 ------ on modern changes of the earth, 45 ----- - on measure of denudation, 116 ------- on a carboniferous land-shell, 118 ------ on strata beneath Silurian system, 125 • ---- - on the imperfection of the geological record, >• 126 ------ on the appearance of species, 127 ------ on Barrande’s colonies, 128 ------ on tertiary formations of Europe and North America, 131 ------ on parallelism of tertiary formations, 133 ------on transport of seeds by icebergs, 147 ------- on great alternations of climate, 154 ------ on the distribution of fresh-water shells, i55 • ----- on land-shells of Madeira, 162 Lyell and Dawson on fossilised trees in Nova Scotia, 121 MACLEAY on analogical characters, 171 Madeira, plants of, 49 ------ beetles of, wingless, 60 ----- - fossil land-shells of, 137 ------ birds of, 157 Magpie tame in Norway, 89 Maize, crossed, ill Malay Archipelago compared with Europe, 122 ------ mammals of, 159 Malpighiaceae, 167 Mammie, rudimentary, 180 Mammals, fossil, in secondary formation, 124 ------ insular, 158 Man, origin of races of, 84 Manatee, rudimentary nails of, 181 Marsupials of Australia, 52-3 ----- - fossil species of, 138 Martens, M., experiment on seeds, 145 Martin, Mr. W. C., on striped mules, 71 Matteucci, on the electric organs of rays, 81 Matthiola, reciprocal crosses of, 107 Means of dispersal, 144 Melipona domestica, 94 Metamorphism of oldest rocks, 125 Mice destroying bees, 37 ------ acclimatisation of, 62 Migration, bears on first appearance of fossils, 122 Miller, Prof., on the cells of bees, 95 Mirabilis, crosses of, 107 Missel-thrush, 38 Mistletoe, complex relations of, 8 Mississippi, rate of deposition at mouth, 116 Mocking thrush of the Galapagos, 162 Modification of species, how far applicable, 192 Moles, blind, 60 Mongrels, fertility and sterility of, no ------ and hybrids compared, 112 Monkeys, fossil, 124 Monochan thus, 170 Mons, Van, on the origin of fruit-trees, 19 Moquin-Tandon on sea-side plants, 59 Morphology, 157 Mozart, musical powers of, 88 Mud, seeds in, 155-6 Mules, striped, 71 Muller, Dr. F., on Alpine Australian plants, 151 Murchison, Sir R., on the formations of Russia, 119 ----- - on azoic formations, 125 ----- - on extinction, 129 Mustela vision, 77 Myanthus, 170 Myrmecocystus, 99 Myrmica, eyes of, 100 Nails, rudimentary, 181 Natural history, future progress of, 193 ------ selection, 39 ----- - system, 166 Naturalisation of forms distinct from the indi­ genous species, 52 ----- - in New Zealand, 85 Nautilus, Silurian, 125 Nectar of plants, 43 Nectaries, how formed, 43 Nelumbium luteum, 156 Nests, variation in, 89 Neuter insects, 98 Newman, Mr., on humble bees, 37 New Zealand, productions of, not perfect, 85 ------ naturalised products of, 137 ------ fossil birds of, 137 ------ glacial action in, 150 ------ crustaceans of, 151 ----- - algce of, 151 ------ number of plants of, 157 ------ flora of, 160 Nicotiana, crossed varieties of, 112 ----- - certain species very sterile, 106 Noble, Mr., on fertility of rhododendron, 104 Nodules, phosphatic, in azoic rocks, 125 Oak, varieties of, 28 Onites apelles, 60 Orchis, pollen of, 82 Organs of extreme perfection, 79 ----- electric, of fishes, 82 ----- - of little importance, 82 ----- homologous, 174 ------rudiments of, and nascent, i3o Ornithorhynchus, 49, 167 Ostrich not capable of flight, 60 ----- habit of laying eggs together, 91 ------American, two species of, 141 Otter, habits of, how acquired, 77 Ouzel, water, 79 Owen, Prof., on birds not flying, 59 ------ on vegetative repetition, 65 ------ on variable length of arms in ourang-outang, 65 �INDEX Owen, Prof., on the swim-bladder of fishes, 81 — on electric organs, 82 —-— on fossil horse of La Plata, 129 —— on relations of ruminants and pachyderms, 134 ------on fossil birds of New Zealand, 137 ------ on succession of types, 137 ------ on affinities of the dugong, 166 ------ on homologous organs, 174 ------ on the metamorphosis of cephalopods and spiders, 177 Pacific Ocean, faunas of, 141 Paley on no organ formed to give pain, 85 Pallas on the fertility of the wild stocks of domestic animals, 105 Paraguay, cattle destroyed by flies, 36 Parasites, 91 Partridge, dirt on feet, 146 Parts greatly developed, variable, 65 ——~ degrees of utility of, 85 Pares major, 78 Passiflora, 104 Peaches in United.States, 41 Pear, grafts of, 108 Pelargonium, flowers of, 64 ------ sterility of, 104 Pelvis of women, 63 Peloria, 64 Period, glacial, 147 Petrels, habits of, 78 Phasianus, fertility of hybrids, 105 Pheasant, young, wild, 90 Philippi on tertiary species in Sicily, 127 Pictet, Prof., on groups of species suddenly appearing, 123-4 ------on rate of organic change, 127 ----- - on continuous succession of genera, 129 ----- - on close alliance of fossils in consecutive formations, 136 —- on embryological succession,' 137 Pierce, Mr., on varieties of wolves, 43 Pigeons with feathered feet and skin between toes, 13 — breeds described, and origin of, 16-17 ------ breeds of, how produced, 23-4 —— tumbler, not being able to get out of egg, 42 reverting to blue colour, 69 —— instinct of tumbling, 90 . carriers, killed by hawks, 146 ------ young of, 178 Pistil, rudimentary, 180 Plants, poisonous, not affecting certain coloured animals, 13 —— selection applied to, 21 ----- - gradual improvement of, 22 ------not improved in barbarous countries, 23 ----- - destroyed by insects, 34 ----- - in midst of range, have to struggle with other plants, 38 ------ nectar of, 43 ------fleshy, on sea-shores, 59 ——- fresh-water, distribution of, 155 — low in scale, widely distributed, 163 Plumage, laws of change in sexes of birds, 42 201 Plums in the United States, 41 Pointer dog, origin of, 22 ------ habits of, 90 Poison not affecting certain coloured animals, 13 ----- - similar effects of, on animals and plants, 193 Pollen of fir-trees, 85 Poole, Col., on striped hemionus, 71 Potamogeton, 156 Prestwich, Mr., on English and French eocene formations, 133 Primrose, 27 ------ sterility of, 103 Primula, varieties of, 27 Proteolepas, 65 Proteus, 61 Psychology, future progress of, 194 Quagga, striped, 71 Quince, grafts of, 108 Rabbit, disposition of young, 90 Races, domestic, characters of, 14-16 Race-horses, Arab, 22 ----- - English, 144 Ramond on plants of Pyrenees, 148 Ramsay, Prof., on thickness of the British for­ mations, 116 ------ on faults, 117 Ratio of increase, 33 Rats, supplanting each other, 38 ------ acclimatisation of, 62 ------ blind, in cave, 61 Rattle-snake, 85 Reason and instinct, 87 Recapitulation, general, 183 Reciprocity of crosses, 107 Record, geological, imperfect, 114 Rengger on flies destroying cattle, 36 Reproduction, rate of, 33 Resemblance to parents in mongrels and hybrids, 112 Reversion, law of inheritance, 13-14 ------ in pigeons to blue colour, 69 Rhododendron, sterility of, 104 Richard, Prof., on Aspicarpa, 167 Richardson, Sir J., on structure of squirrels, 77 ------ on fishes of the southern hemisphere, 151 Robinia, grafts of, 108 Rodents, blind, 60 Rudimentary organs, 180 Rudiments important for classification, 167 Sagaret on grafts, 108 Salmon, males fighting, and hooked jaws of, 42 Salt-water, how far injurious to seeds, 145 Saurophagus sulphuratus, 78 Schiodte on blind insects, 61 Schlegel on snakes, 63 Sea-water, how far injurious to seeds, 145 Sebright, Sir J., on crossed animals, 16 ------ on selection of pigeons, 20 Sedgwick, Prof., on groups of species suddenly appearing, 123 Seedlings destroyed by insects, 34 Seeds, nutriment in, 38 ------winged, 64 �202 INDEX Seeds, power of, resisting salt-water, 145 Strata, thickness of, in Britain, 116 ------ in crops and intestines of birds, 146 Stripes on horses, 71 ------ eaten by fish, 146, 156 Structure, degrees of utility of, 85 ------ in mud, 155 Struggle for existence, 32 ,------ hooked, on islands, 158 Succession, geological, 127 Selection of domestic products, 19 Succession of types in same areas, 137 ------principle not of recent origin, 21 Swallow, one species supplanting another, 38 ------ unconscious, 21 Swim-bladder, 81 ------ natural, 39 System, natural, 166 ------sexual, 42 ------ natural circumstances favourable to, 47 Tail of giraffe, 82 Sexes, relations of, 42 • ----- - of aquatic animals, 83 Sexual characters variable, 6S ------ rudimentary, 181 ------- selection, 42 Tarsi deficient, 60 Sheep, merino, their selection, 20 Tausch on umbelliferous flowers, 64 ----- - two sub-breeds, unintentionally produced, Teeth and hair correlated, 63 22 - ---- - embryonic, traces of, in birds, 180 ------ mountain, varieties of, 37 • ------ rudimentary, in embryonic calf, 180, 191 Shells, colours of, 59 Tegetmeier, Mr., on cells of bees, 95, 97 ------ littoral, seldom embedded, 118 Temminck on distribution aiding classification, ------- fresh-water, dispersal of, 154 168 ------ of Madeira, 157 Thouin on grafts, 108 ----- - land, distribution of, 159 Thrush, aquatic species of, 79 Silene, fertility of crosses, 106 ------ mocking, of the Galapagos, 162 Silliman, Prof., on blind rat, 61 ------ young of, spotted, 176 Skulls of young mammals, 83 ------ nest of, 101 Slave-making instinct, 92 Thuret, M., on crossed fucT7io7 Smith, Col. Hamilton, on striped horses, 71 Thwaites, Mr., on acclimatisation, 62 ------ Mr. Fred., on slave-making ants, 92 Tierra del Fuego, dogs of, 90 ------- on neuter ants, 100 1 -------plants of, 152-3 ------- Mr., of Jordan Hill, on the degradation of Timber-drift, 146 coast-rocks, 116 Time, lapse of, 116 Snap-dragon, 70 Titmouse, 78 Somerville, Lord, on selection of sheep, 20 Toads on islands, 158 Sorbus, grafts of, 108 Tobacco, crossed varieties of, 112 Spaniel, King Charles’s breed, 22 Tomes, Mr., on the distribution of bats, 159 Species, polymorphic, 26 Transitions in varieties rare, 74 ------ common, variable, 29 Trees on islands belong to peculiar orders, 158 ----- - in large genera variable, 29 ------ - with separated sexes, 46 ------ groups of, suddenly appearing, 123, 125 Trifolium pratense, 37, 44 ■----- - incarnatum, 44 ------ beneath Silurian formations, 125 ------ successively appearing, 127 Trigonia, 131 ’ ------ changing simultaneously throughout the Trilobites, 125 world, 131 • ----- - sudden extinction of, 131 Spencer, Lord, on increase in size of cattle, 22 Troglodytes, 101 Sphex, parasitic, 91-2 Tucutucu, blind, 60 Tumbler pigeons, habits of, hereditary, 90 Spiders, development of, 177 Spitz-dog crossed with fox, 110-11 ------ young of, 178 . Turkey-cock, brush of hair on breast, 43 Sports in plants, 12 Turkey, naked skin on head, 83 Sprengel, C. C., on crossing, 46 ------ young, wild, 90 • ---- - on ray-florets, 64 Turnip and cabbage, analogous variations of, Squirrels, gradations in structure, 77 69 Staffordshire heath, changes in, 36 Type, unity of, 87 Stag-beetles, fighting, 42 Types, succession of, in same areas, 137 Sterility from changed conditions of life, 12 ------ of hybrids, 102 Udders enlarged by use, 12 ------laws of, 105 ------ rudimentary, 180 • ----- causes of, 109 Ulex, young leaves of, 176 ------from unfavourable conditions, 109 Umbelliferae, outer and inner florets of, 63 ----- - of certain varieties, III St. Helena, productions of, 157 Unity of type, 87 St. Hilaire, Aug., on classification, 167 Use, effects of, under domestication, 12 St.John, Mr. , on habits of cats, 43 ------ effects of, in a state of nature, 59 Sting of bees, 85 Utility, how far important in the construction of Stocks, aboriginal, of domestic animals, 15 each part, 84 �INDEX Valenciennes on fresh-water fish, 155 Variability of mongrels and hybrids, 112 Variation under domestication, 11 ------ caused by reproductive system being affected by conditions of life, 11 ------ under nature, 25 ----- - laws of, 58 Variations appear at corresponding ages, 13, 42 ------ analogous in distinct species, 69 Varieties natural, 25 ----- - struggle between, 37 —— domestic, extinction of, 51 •----- - transitional, rarity of, 74 ----- - when crossed, fertile, no ------ when crossed, sterile, ill ------ classification of, 169 Verbascum, sterility of, 104 —— varieties of, crossed, in Verneuil, M. de, on the succession of species, 132 Viola tricolor, 37 Volcanic islands, denudation of, 117 Vulture, naked skin on head, 83 Wading-birds, 155 Wallace, Mr., on origin of species, 7 —■ — on law of geographical distribution, 144 ------ on the Malay Archipelago, 159 Wasp, sting of, 85 Water, fresh, productions of, 154 Water-hen, 79 Waterhouse, Mr., on Australian marsupials, 53 ------ on greatly developed parts being variable, 65 ------ on the cells of bees, 94 ------ on general affinities, 172 Water-ouzel, 79 Watson, Mr. H. C., on range of varieties of British plants, 27 ------on acclimatisation, 62 ----- - on rarity of intermediate varieties, 75 203 Watson, Mr. H. C., on flora of Azores, 147 —— on Alpine plants, 148, 152 Weald, denudation of, 117 Web of feet in water-birds, 79 West Indian islands, mammals of, 159 Westwood on species in large genera being closely allied to others, 30 •—— on the tarsi of Engidce, 68 ------- on the antennae of hymenopterous insects, l67 Wheat, varieties of, 51-2 White Mountains, flora of, 147 Wings, reduction of size, 59-60 Wings of insects homologous with branchile, 81 ------ rudimentary, in insects, 180 Wolf crossed with dog, 90 ------ of Falkland Isles, 158 Wollaston, Mr., on varieties of insects, 27 ----- - on fossil varieties of land-shells in Madeira, 28 ------ on colours of insects on sea-shore, 59 ------ on wingless beetles, 60 ------ on rariety of intermediate varieties, 75 ------ on insular insects, 157 ------ on land-shells of Madeira, naturalised, 162 Wolves, varieties of, 43 Woodpecker, habits of, 79 ----- - green colour of, 83 Woodward, Mr., on the duration of specific forms, 120 —— on the continuous succession of genera, 129 ----- - on the succession of types, 137 World, species changing simultaneously through­ out; 131 Wrens, nest of, 101 Youatt, Mr., on selection, 20 —-— on sub-breeds of sheep, 22 •----- - on rudimentary horns in young cattle, 181 Zebra, stripes on, 71 No. 12 of the R. 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By Aylmer Maude, id. “The struggles of a soul in search of truth.”—Newcastle Daily Leader. WAR AND PATRIOTISM. By Aylmer Maude. id. “ Both as a source of argument and reference it should be of great value.”-—Labour Leader. ESSAYS IN ART. By Aylmer Maude. 2d. (i) An Int.ro- duction to “What is Art?” \2\ Tolstoy’s View of Art. London: GRANT RICHARDS, 48, LEICESTER SQUARE. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or: The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Darwin, Charles [1809-1882] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 208 p. ; 22 cm. Series title: R.P.A. Cheap Reprints Series number: No. 11 Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Includes index. First published 1859-60. Reprint of 1st ed. "Mr John Murray, the original publisher, is now issuing the final edition in cloth binding...Students and all admirers of Darwin should compare the first and last editions...in order to fully understand the development of the doctrine of Evolution."--Publishers' note. Publisher's advertisements (RPA, Longmans, Grant Richards) at the end (p. 204-208). Printed in double columns. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Watts & Co. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1903 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N186 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Science Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or: The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Evolution Evolution (Biology) Natural Selection https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/8de2ec7788965ab1bef5895336e6dcff.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=mTDufVQPyL8AathSf9FbECuouaw7-%7ETrIp4icvb2cpZHOYvqg3hhqf0VOdVHuKqcSrGnyZVsrj-lI0kjnJ8DBszvGzJLqNmNpw1VMsdhoXVwIqB60jiLWLgx4wILxA8VwAh8m0bHhQuwQp%7EWWLRHH1tAPrijuY49viTtYYXm5hGJRR3PQoPhD6tcfpSw-c6mvvae94fslpOgjH-P-i8tOxO4ZaBOozmLLtZZcRXEmNZ6d3VmhzP5i7nBHrIdUSUeHVuLjCLH9T2rO4CnodoxVa0jDTvAwI0crGzkfGhiMR4Yb-bmi1gHLCHXbefPVt6mPhv3mzw-et6PN3jYX4vlCQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM cf9ae245e15da33d03887e9859ee202d PDF Text Text ���������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Conway Hall Library & Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Design and natural selection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Moss, Arthur B. Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 16 p. ; 19 cm. Notes: Titles by the same author listed on back cover. Date of publication from KVK (OCLC, WorldCat). Underlining on pages 8 & 10. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Watts & Co. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1885] Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G5783 Subject The topic of the resource Creationism Evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Design and natural selection), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Creation Natural Selection https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/abfb178d015d5e0c8f1b43dc76decb4e.pdf?Expires=1781740800&Signature=P-vyCCSQHFSdkCJsNbZg4eMkWcxr8oOqErmWqMUCy1R9n1vMbDr052Yp%7EIXhRNMuSAR4lJd6j36Uvbxo5bYeVlM%7EoaPVBtASngOGOgK493nxN1wiCC-C9J4cLQDpl98Z-2C52TTWq2T8PtQ8sAKqrXR04iA61yy6Ncmy49EiLD7CL89G6hoZ0RxNMSrHKBU9s2GtbWnqnWvT57a8EDZ5B4K-oWa1-bRuRPQevqM5Z09j3sLEjeibVW2xDSWTbk3UG6SfA76fYNnPJLTnT2jkuAiBz63h1EC0kQARX1cvPynckh67oQHpyPt9shfuS5Vwl9hKWPuTULqoK0906nfItA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM ff3d92180984c7304d5ac5943fe32a96 PDF Text Text NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION �A Library Edition of this work, with portraits, is published by Mr. Grant Richards, 48, Leicester Square, London, W.C., price Five Shillings net. Uniform with “ Pioneers oj Evolution,” price 6d., by post 8d. LECTURES AND ESSAYS. By Thomas Henry Huxley. Con­ sisting of Autobiography, Three Lectures on Evolution, On the Physical Basis of Life, Naturalism and Supernaturalism, The Value of Witness to the Miraculous, Agnosticism, The Christian Tradition in Relation to Judaic Christianity, Agnosticism and Christianity. MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. By S. Laing, author of Human Origins, Problems of the Future, A Modern Zoroastrian, etc. �bi PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES TO HUXLEY WITH AN INTERMEDIATE CHAPTER ON THE CAUSES OF ARREST OF THE MOVEMENT BY EDWARD CLODD (Author of t! The Childhood of the World,” “ The Story of Creation,” “ Thomas Henry Huxley,” etc., etc.) (issued for the rationalist press association, ltd., by arrangement WITH MR. GRANT RICHARDS) WATTS & Co. 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. 1902 �TO MY BELOVED A. A. L. WHOSE FELLOWSHIP AND HELP HAVE SWEETENED LIFE �PREFACE This book needs only brief introduction. It attempts to tell the story of the origin of the Evolution idea in Ionia, and, after long arrest, of the revival of that idea in modern times, when its profound and permanent influence on thought in all directions, and, therefore, on human relations and conduct, is apparent. Between birth and revival there were- the centuries of suspended animation, when the nepenthe of dogma drugged the reason ; the Church teaching, and the laity mechanically accepting, the sufficiency of the Scriptures and of the General Councils to decide on matters which lie outside the domain of both. Hence the necessity for particularising the causes which actively arrested advance in knowledge for sixteen hundred years. In indicating the parts severally played in the Renascence of Evolution by a small group of illustrious men, the writer, through the courtesy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, has been permitted to see the original docu­ ments which show that the theory of revolution as a whole—z>., as dealing with the non-living, as well as �PRÉFACE 6 the living, contents of the Universe, was formulated by Mr. Spencer in the year preceding the publication of the Origin of Species. Rosemont, Tufnell Park, London, N. 14th December, 1896. �CONTENTS PART I Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Lucretius—b.c. 6oo-a.d. 50 PART II The Arrest i. of Inquiry—a.d. 50-A.D. 1600 From the Early Christian Period to the Time a.d. 50-A.D. 400 of Augustine— 2. From Augustine to Lord Bacon—a.d. 400-A.D. 1600 PART III The Renascence of Science—a.d. 1600 onwards PART IV Modern Evolution— I. Darwin and Wallace 2. Herbert Spencer 3. Thomas Henry Huxley INDEX �“Nature, which governs the whole, will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new.” Marcus Aurelius, vii. 25. �PART I PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS B.C. ÔOO-A.D. 50 ” These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them.”—Hebrews xi. 13. “One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the parentage,saida Bechuana chief to Casalis the missionary. The barbarian philosopher spoke wiser than he knew, for in his words lay that doctrine of con­ tinuity and unity which is the creed of modern science. They are a suitable text to the discourse of this chapter, the design of which is to bring out what the brilliancy of present-day discoveries tends to throw into shadow—namely, the antiquity of the ideas of which those discoveries are the result. Although the Theory of Evolution, as we define it, is new, the speculations which made it possible are, at least, twenty-five centuries old. Indeed, it is not practicable, since the remote past yields no documents, to fix their beginnings. Moreover, charged, as they are, with many crudities, they are not detachable from the bar­ baric conceptions of the universe which are the philosophies of past and the legends of present times. Fontenelle, a writer of the last century, shrewdly remarked that “all nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savage, and retained them from custom and religious con­ servatism.” For, as Walter Bagehot argues in his brilliant little book on Physics and Politics, and as all anthropo­ logical research goes to prove, the lower races are non-progressive both through fear and instinct. And the majority of the members of higher races have not escaped from the operation of the same causes. Hence the persistence of coarse and grotesque elements in speculations wherein man has made gradual approach to the truth of things; hence, too—the like phenomena having to be interpreted —the similarity of the explanation of them. And as primitive myth embodies primitive theology, primitive morals, and primitive science, the history of beliefs shows how few there be who have escaped from the tyranny of that autho­ rity and sanctity with which the lapse of time invests old ideas. Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition of progress ; and dissatisfaction involves opposition. As Grant Allen puts it, in one of his most felicitous poems : If systems that be are the order of God, Revolt is a part of the order. Hence a stage in the history of certain peoples when, in questioning what is commonly accepted, intellectual freedom is born. Such a stage was, markedly, reached whenever, for example, an indi­ vidual here and there challenged the current belief about the beginnings and nature of things, beliefs held because they were taught, not because their correspondence with fact had been examined. A pioneer (French, pionnier ; Italian, pedone; from Latin pedes'} is, literally, a foot-soldier; one who goes before an army to clear the road of obstructions. Hence the application of the term to men who are in the van of any new �lo PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION movement; hence its special fitness in the present connection, as designating men whose speculations cut a pathway through jungles of myth and legend to the realities of things. The Pioneers of Evolution—the first on record to doubt the truth of the theory of special creation, whether as the work of depart­ mental gods or of one Supreme Deity matters not—lived in Greece about the' time already mentioned; six centuries before Christ. Not, in the early stages of the Evolution idea, in the Greece limited, as now, to a rugged peninsula in the south-eastern corner of Europe and to the surrounding islands; but in the Greece which then included Ionia, on the opposite sea-board of Asia Minor. From times beyond memory or record, the islands of the /Egean had been the nurseries of culture and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants had spread themselves both east and west, feeding the spirit of inquiry, and im­ bibing influences from older civilisations, notably of Egypt and Chaldaea. But, mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks never lost their own stronglymarked individuality, and in imparting what they had acquired or discovered to younger peoples—that is, younger in culture—they stamped it with an . impress all their own. At the later period with which we are dealing, refugees from the Peloponnesus, who would not submit to the Dorean yoke, had been long settled in Ionia. To what extent they had been influenced by contact with their neighbours is a question which, even were it easy to * answer, need not occupy us here. Certain it is that trade and travel had widened their intellectual horizon, and, although India lay too remote to touch them closely (if that incurious, dreamy East had touched them, it would have taught them nothing), there was' Baby­ lonia with her star-watchers, and Egypt with her land-surveyors. From the one, these Ionians probably gained knowledge of certain periodic movements of some of the heavenly bodies; and from the I other, a few rules of mensuration, per­ chance a little crude science. But this is conjecture. For all the rest that she evolved, and with which she enriched the world, ancient Greece is in debt to none. While the Oriental shrunk from quest after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks in his Aspects of the Greek Genius, on “each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven,” the Greek eagerly sought for the law governing the facts around him. And in Ionia was born the idea foreign to the East, but which has become the startingpoint of all subsequent scientific inquiry—the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. Sir Henry Maine said that “except the blind forces of Nature nothing moves which is not Greek in its origin,” and we feel how hard it is to avoid exaggeration when speaking of the heritage bequeathed by Greece as the giver of every fruitful, quickening idea which has developed human faculty on all sides, and enriched every province of life. Amid serious defects of character, as craftiness, ava­ riciousness, and unscrupulousness, the Greeks had the redeeming grace of pursuit after knowledge which nought could baffle (Plato, Republic, iv., 435), and that healthy outlook on things which saved them from morbid introspection. There arose among them no Simeon Stylites to mount his profitless pillar; no filth-engrained fakir to waste life in con­ templating the tip of his nose; no school­ man to idly speculate how many angels could dance upon a needle’s point, or to debate such fatuous questions as the .language which the saints in heaven will speak after the Last Judgment. In his excellent and cautious survey of Early Greek Philosophy, which we mainly follow in this section, Professor Burnet says that the real advance made by the Ionians was through their “leaving off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what wa§. when as yet there was nothing, and asked jnstead_what all things really are now.” For the early notions of the~Greeks �THALES TO LUCRETIUS if about nature, being an inheritance from Aristotle, born at Eresus in Lesbos, 371 Perhaps, following Professor their barbaric ancestors, were embodied b.c.). in myths and legends bearing strong re­ Burnet’s able guidance through the com­ semblance to those found among the plexities of definitions, the term Bound­ uncivilised tribes of Polynesia and else­ less best expresses the “ one eternal, where in our day. For example, the old indestructible substance out of which nature-myth of Cronus separating heaven everything arises, and into which every­ and earth by the mutilation of Uranus thing once more returns”; in other words, occurs among Chinese, Japanese, and the exhaustless stock of matter from Maoris, and among the ancient Hindus which the waste of existence is being £ continually made good. and Egyptians. Anaximander was the first to assert The earliest school of scientific ^peculation was ( at Miletus, ~the most the origin of life from the non-living, z.<?. flourishing city^ofloma” Thales, whose “ the moist element as it was evaporated 1 name heads the list of the “Seven Sages,” by the sun,” and to speak of man aS j was its founder. As with other noted “like another animal-—namely, a fish, in philosophers of this and later periods, the beginning.” This looks well-nigh the exact date neither of his birth nor of akin to prevision of the mutability of his death is known, but the sixth century species, and of what modern biology has .before Christ may be held to cover the proved concerning the marine ancestry of the highest animals, although it is j period~wTien he “-flourished." That “ nothing"” comes into being out one of many ancient speculations as to of nothing, and that nothing passes the origin of life in slimy matter. And away into nothing,” was the conviction when Anaximander adds that, “ while j with which he, and those who followed other animals quickly find food for him, started on their quest. All around themselves, man alone requires a pro-' was change: everything always becoming longed .periotToTsucUing,” heanticipatea something else; “ all in motion like themodern explanation of thejongm of streams.” There must be that which is the "rudimentary family through” the the vehicle of all the changes, and of all development of the social instincts and 1 the motions which produce them. What, affections. The lengthening of the pejioSj therefore, was this permanent and primary of infancy invoTves^ependenceZoiL-the I substance? in other words, of what is parents, and evolves the sympathy which the world made ? And Thales, perhaps lies'" at ATtTTiasc^ATsQuial relations (¿¡A through observing that it could become Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, ii. vaporous, liquid, and solid in turn; 344, 36°)In dealing with speculations so remote, I perhaps—if, as tradition records, he visited Egypt—through watching the we have to guard against reading modern wonder-working, life-giving Nile; perhaps, meanings into writings produced in ages as doubtless sharing the current belief whose limitations of knowledge werte in an ocean-washed earth; said that the serious, and whose temper and stand­ point are wholly alien to our own. For primary substance was Water. Anaximander, his friend and pupil, example, shrewd as are some of the disagreeing with what seemed to him a guesses made by Anaximander, we find too concrete answer, argued, in more him describing the sun as “a ring /abstract fashion, that “the material cause twenty-eight times the size of the earth, and first element of things was the like a cart-wheel with the felloe hollow Infinite.” This material cause, which and full of fire, showing the fire at a he was the first thus to name, “ is neither certain point, as if through the nozzle water nor any other of what are now of a pair of bellows.” And if he made called the elements ” (we quote from some approach to truer ideas of the Theophratus, the famous pupil of earth’s shape as “convex and round,” �12 ProNEERS OF EVOLUTION the world of his day, as in the days of Homer, thought of it as flat, and as floating on the all-surrounding water. The Ionian philosophers lacked not insight, but the scientific method of starting with working hypotheses, or of observation before theory, was as yet unborn. In this brief survey of the subject there will be no advantage in detailing the various speculations which followed on the heels of those of Thales and Anaximander, since these varied only in non-essentials; or, like that of Pythagoras and his school, which Zeller regards as an outcome of the teaching of Anaxi­ mander, were purely abstract and fanciful. As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose philosophy was ethical as well as cosmical, held that all things are made of numbers, each of which was credited with special character and property. A belief in such symbols as entities seems impossible to us, but its existence in early thought is conceivable, when, as Aristotle says, they were “ not separated from the objects of sense.” Even at the present day, among the eccentric people who still believe in the modern sham-Gnosticism known as Theosophy, and in Astrology, we find the delusion that numbers possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far as the ancients are concerned, “consider the lively emotions excited at a time when multi­ plication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the construc­ tion and equivalence of figures, with all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine art, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us....... and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every problem ; the cause of all exist­ ence ; or that these speculations were more than once revived in after ages ” (Benn, Greek Philosophers, i. 12). Xenophanes of Colophon, onp of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, deserves, however, a passing reference. He, with Parmenides and Zeno, are the chief representatives of the Eleatic school, so named from the city in south­ western Italy where a Greek colony had settled. The tendency of that school was towards metaphysical theories. He was the first known observer to detect the value of fossils as evidences of the action of water; but his chief claim to notice rests on the fact that, passing beyond the purely physical speculations of the Ionian school, he denied the idea of a primary substance, and theorised about the nature and actions of super­ human beings. Living at a time when there was a revival of old and gross superstitions to which the vulgar had recourse when fears of invasions arose, he dared to attack the old and persistent ideas about the gods, as in the following sentences from the fragments of his writings :— “ Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among men, theft and adulteries and deception of one another.” “ There never was nor will be a man who has clear certainty as to what I say about the gods and about all things ; for, even if he does chance to say what is right, yet he himself does not know that it is so. But all are free to guess.” “ Mortals think that the gods are born as they are, and have senses, and a voice and body like their own. So the Ethio­ pians make their gods black and snub­ nosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes.” “There is one god, the greatest among gods and jnen, unlike mortals both jn mind and body.” Had such heresies been spoken in Athens, where the effects of the religious revival of the sixth century were still unspent, the “secular arm” of the archons would probably have made short work of Xenophanes. But in Elea, or in whatever other colony he may have lived, “ the gods were left to take care of themselves.” Greater than the philosophers yet named is geraclitug of Ephesus, nick­ named “the dark,” from the obscurity �TEA LES TO Lt/CRETIUS of his Style. His original writings have shared the fate of most documents of antiquity, and exist, like many of these, only in fragments preserved in the works of other authors. Many of his aphorisms are indeed dark sayings ; but those that yield their meaning are full of truth and suggestiveness. As for example—“ The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.” “You will not find out the boundaries “Man is kindled and put out like a 'light in the night-time.” “ Man’s character is his fate.” But these have special value as keys to his philosophy: . “You cannot step twice into the same Vivers ; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” “ Homer was wrong in saying : ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men ! He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the uni­ verse ; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.” Flux or movement, says Heraclitus, is the all-pervading law of things, and in the opposition of forces, by which things áre kept going, there is underlying harmony. Still on the quest after the primary substance whose manifestations are so various, he found it in Fire, since “ the quantity of it in a flame burning Steadily appears to remain the same; the flame seems to be what we call a ‘thing.’ And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuelthat feeds it. This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an ‘ever-living fire’—‘this order, which is the same in all things, and which no one of gods or men has made ’—we can under­ stand how fire is always becoming all things, while all things are always re­ turning to it.” And as is the world, so is man, made up, like it, both soul and body, of the fire, the water, and the earth. We are and are not the same for two consecutive moments ; “the fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth, but as the opposite process goes on simultaneously we appear to remain the same.” As speculation advanced, it became more and more applied to details; theories of the beginnings of life being followed by theories of the origin of its various forms. This is a feature of the philosophy of Empedocles, who flourished in the fifth century b.c. The advance of Persia westward had led to migrations of Greeks to the south of Italy and Sicily, and it was at Agrigentum, in that island, that Empedoclbswas"born about 490. He has an honoured place among the earliest who supplanted guesses about the world by inquiry into the world itself. Many legends are told of hi® magic arts, one of which, it will be remembered, Matthew Arnold makes an occasion of some fine reflections in his poem, Empedocles in Etna. The philo»’ sopher was said to have brought back to life a woman who, apparently, had been dead for thirty days. As he ascends the mountain, Pausanias of Gela, with am address to whom the poem of Empe­ docles opens, would fain have his curiosity slaked as to this and other marvels re­ ported of him : Ask not the latest news of the last miracle, Ask not what days and nights In trance Pantheia lay, But ask how thou such sights May’st see without dismay ; Ask what most helps when known, thou son Anchitus. His speculations about things, lik<3 those of Parmenides before him and of Lucretius after him, are set down in verse. From the remains of his Poem on Nature we learn that he conceived “ the four roots of all things” to be Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. They are “fools, lacking far-reaching thoughts^ who deem that what before was not,, comes into being, or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.” There­ fore the “ roots ” or' elements are eternal and indestructible. They are acted upon by two forces, which are also material, �14 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTltJN Love and Strife; the one a uniting agent, the other a disrupting agent. From the four roots, thus operated upon, arise “ the colours and forms ” of living things—trees first, both male and female, then fragmentary parts of animals, heads without necks, and “eyes that strayed up and down in want of a forehead,” which, combined together, produced monstrous forms. These, lacking power to propagate, perished, and were replaced by “ whole-natured” but sexless “forms” which “arose from the earth,” and which, as Strife gained the upper hand, became male and female. Herein, amidst much fantastic speculation, would appear to be the germ of the modern theory that the unadapted become ex­ tinct, and that only the adapted survive. Nature kills off her failures to make room for her successes. .Anaxagoras, who was a contemporary of Empedocles, interests us because he was the first philosopher to repair to Athens, and the first sufferer for truth’s sake of whom we have record in Greek annals. Because he taught that the sun was a red-hot stone, and that the moon had plains and ravines in it, he was put upon his trial, and but for the influence of his friend, the famous Pericles, might have suffered death. Speculations, how­ ever bold, they be. pass nnheg.dpd till they collide with the popular creeds and, in thus attacking the gods, attack a seemingly divinely settled order. Athens then, and long after, while indifferent about natural science, was, under the influence of the revival referred to above, actively hostile to free thinking. The opinions of Anaxagoras struck at the existence of the gods and emptied Olympus. If the sky was but an air­ filled space, what became of Zeus? if the sun was only a fiery ball, what became of Apollo ? Mr. Grote says {History of Greece, i. 466) that, “in the view of the early Greek, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious ; even in later times Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred the charge of blas­ phemy for dispersonifying Helios.” Of Socrates, who was himself condemned to death for impiety in denying old gods and introducing new ones, the same authority writes: “Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena, in which human research was insane, fruitless, and im­ pious.” So Demos and his “ betters ” clung, as the majority still cling, to the myths of their forefathers. They re­ paired to the oracles, and watched for the will of the gods in signs and omens. In his philosophy Anaxagoras held that there was a portion of everything in everything, and that things are variously mixed in infinite numbers of seeds, each after its kind. From these, through the action of an external cause, called Nous, which also is material, although 'the “ thinnest of all things and the purest,” and “has power over all things,” there arose plants and animals. It is probable, as Professor Burnet remarks, “that Anaxagoras substituted Nous, still con­ ceived as a body, for the Love and Strife of Empedocles, simply because he wished to retain the old Ionic doctrine of a substance that ‘ knows ’ all things,' and to identify this with the new theory of a substance that ‘ moves ’ all things.” Thus far speculation has run largely on the origin of life-forms, but now we find revival of speculation about the nature of things generally, and the formulation of a theory of the constitution of matter which links Greek cosmology with Dalton’s Atomic Theory. Democritus of Abdera, who was born about 460 b.c., has the credit of having elaborated an atomic theory, but probably he only further developed what Leucippus had taught before him. Of this last-named philosopher nothing whatever is known; indeed, his existence has been doubted, but it counts for some­ thing that Aristotle gives him the credit of the discovery, and that TheophrasUis, in the first book of his Opinions, wrote of Leucippus as follows : “ He assumed �TwaTes*to lUcrptius innumerable and ever-moving elements— namely, the atoms. And he made their forms infinite in number, since there was no reason why they should be of one kind rather than another, and because he saw that there was unceasing be­ coming and change in things. He held, further, that what is is no more real than what is not, and that both are alike causes of the things that come into being ; for he laid down that the sub­ stance of the atoms was compact and full, and he called them what is, while they moved in the void which he called what is not, but affirmed to be just as real as what is.” Thus did “ he answer the question that Thales had been the first to ask.” Postponing further reference to this theory until the great name of Lucretius, its Roman exponent, is reached, we find a genuine scientific method making its first start in the person of Aristotle. This remarkable man, the founder of the experimental school, and the Father of Natural History, was born 384 B.c.__at Stagira in Macedonia. In his eighteenth year he left his native place for Athens, where he became a pupil of Plato. Disappointed, as it is thought, at not succeeding his master in the Academy, he removed to Mytilene in the island of Lesbos, where he received an invitation from Philip of Macedon to become tutor to his son, the famous Alexander the Great. When Alexander went on his expedition to Asia, Aristotle returned to Athens, teaching in the “school” which his genius raised to the first rank. ■There he wrote the greater part of his works, the completion of some of which was stopped by his death at Chaicis in 322. The range of his studies was boundless, but in this brief notice we must limit our survey—and the more so because Aristotle’s speculations out­ side natural history abound in errors— to his pioneer work in organic evolution. Here, in the one possible method of reaching the truth, theory follows obser­ vation. Stagira lay on the Strymonic gulf, and a boyhood spent by the seashore gave Aristotle ample opportunity for! noting the variations, and withal gradal tions, between marine plants and ani­ mals, among which last-named it should be noted as proof of his insight that he was keen enough to include sponges. Here was laid the foundation of a classi­ fication of life-forms on which all corre­ sponding attempts were based. Then,; he saw, as none other before him had seen, and as none after him saw foi centuries, the force of heredity, that still unsolved problem of biology. Speaking] broadly of his teaching, the details of which would fill pages, its main features are (1) His insistence on observation. In his History of Animals he says: “We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact. For it is in facts that we must seek general principles! and these must always accord with factS.I Experience furnishes the particular facts from which induction is the pathway to general laws.” (2) His rejection of chance and assertion of law, not, follow­ ing a common error, of law personified as cause, but as the term by which we express the fact that certain phenomena always occur in a certain order. In his Physics Aristotle says that “Zeus rains not that corn may be increased, but from necessity. Similarly, if some one’s* corn is destroyed-by raTrijTt "does ndgl rain forthis purpose, but as an accidental circumstance. It does not appear to be from fortune or chance that it frequently rains in winter, but from necessity.” (3) On the question of the origin of life­ forms he was nearest of all to its modern solution, setting forth the necessity “ that germs should have been first produced, and not immediately animals ; and that soft mass which first subsisted was the germ. In plants, also, there is purpose, but it is less distinct; and this shows that plants were produced in the same manner as animals, not by chance, as by the union of olives with grape vines. Similarly, it may be argued that there should be an accidental generation of the germs of things; but he who asserts �i6 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION this subverts Nature herself, for Nature produces those things which, being con­ tinually moved by a certain principle contained in themselves, arrive at a certain end.” In the eagerness of theo­ logians to discover proof of a belief in one God among the old philosophies, the references made by Aristotle to a “perfecting principle,” an “efficient cause,” a “prime mover,” and so forth, have been too readily construed as de­ noting a Monotheistic creed, which, re­ minding us of the “ one god ” of Xeno­ phanes, is also akin to the Personal God of Christianity. “The Stagirite,” as Mr. Benn remarks (Greek Philos., i. 352), “agrees with Catholic theism, and he agrees with the First Article of the English Church, though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God is with­ out parts or passions ; but there his agree­ ment ceases. Excluding such a thing as divine interference with nature, his theo­ logy of course excludes the" possTEflity of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace?’ He is a being who “does not~ interest himself in human affairs.” But, differ as the commentators may as to what Aristotle meant, his assumed place in the orthodox line led, as will be seen hereafter, to the acceptance of his philosophy by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in the fourth century, and by other Fathers of the Church, so that the mediaeval theories of the Bible, blended with Aristotle, represent the sum of knowledge held as sufficient until the discoveries o_f Copernicus in the six­ teenth century upset the Ptolemaic theory, with its fixed earth, and system of cycles and epicycles in which the heavenly bodies moved. He thereby upset very much besides. Like Anaxi­ mander and others, Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation, although only in the case of certain animals, as of eels from the mud of ponds, and of insects from putrid matter. However, in this, both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and many men of science down to the latter part of the seventeenth century, followed him. For example, Van Helmont, an experimental chemist of that period, gave a recipe for making fleas; and another scholar showed him­ self on a level with the unlettered rustics of to-day, who believe that eels are produced from horse-hairs thrown into a pond. Of deeper interest, as marking Aris­ totle’s prevision, is his anticipation of what is known as Epigenesis, or the theory of the development of the gerrft individuals through the union of thp fertilising"powers of the male and female organs. This theory, which was proved, by the? researches of Harvey,-the'dis­ coverer of the circulation of the blood, and is accepted by all biologists to-day, was opposed by Malpighi, an Italian physician, born in 1628, the year in which Harvey published his great dis­ covery, and by other prominent men of science down to the last century. Malpighi and his school contended that the perfect animal is already “preformed” in the germ; for example, the hen’s egg, before fecundation, containing an ex­ cessively minute, but complete, chick. It therefore followed that in any germ the germs of all subsequent offspring must be contained, and in the application of this “ box-within-box ” theory its de­ fenders even computed the number of human germs concentrated in the ovary of mother Eve, estimating these at two hundred thousand millions ! When the “ preformation ” theory was revived by Bonnet and others in the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, passed the following shrewd criticism on it:— “Many ingenious philosophers have found so great difficulty in conceiving the manner of reproduction in animals that they have supposed all the numerous progeny to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created. This idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater continuity to organised matter than we can readily admit. These embryons........ must possess a greater �THALES TO LUCRETIUS degree of minuteness than that which was ascribed to the devils who tempted St Anthony, of whom twenty thousand were said to have been able to dance a saraband on the point of a needle with­ out the least incommoding each other.” Although no theistic element could be extracted by the theologians of the Early Christian Church from the systems of Empedocles and Democritus; thereby securing them a share in the influence exercised by the great Stagirite, they were formative powers in Greek philo­ sophy, and, moreover, have “ come by their own ” in these latter days. Their chief representative in what is known as the Post-Aristotelian period is Epicurus, who was born at Samos, 342 b.c. As with Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, his teaching has been perverted, so that his name has become loosely identified with indulgence in gross and sensual living. He saw in pleasure the highest happiness, and therefore advo­ cated the pursuit of pleasure to attain happiness ; but he did not thereby mean the pursuit of the unworthy. Rather did he counsel the following after pure, high, and noble aims, whereby alone a man could have peace of mind. It is not hard to see that in the minds of men of low ideals the tendency towards passivity which lurked in such teaching would aid their sliding into the pursuit of mere animal enjoyment ; hence the gross and limited association of the term Epicurean. Epicurus accepted the theory of Leucippus, and applied it all round. The fainéant gods, who dwell serenely indifferent to human affairs, and about whom men should therefore have no dread; all things, whether dead or living; even the ideas that enter the mind ; are alike composed of atoms. He also ac­ cepted the theory broached by Empe­ docles as to the survival of fit and Capable forms, after life had arrived at these through the processes of sponta­ neous generation and the production of monstrosities. Adopting the physical Speculations of these forerunners, he made them the vehicle of didactic and ïj ethical philosophies which inspired the production of the wonderful poem of Lucretius. Between this great Roman and Epi­ curus—a period of some two centuries —there is no name of sufficient promi­ nence to warrant attention. The decline of Greece had culminated in her conquest by the semi-barbarian Mummius, and in her consequent addition to the provinces of the Roman Empire. What life lin­ gered in her philosophy within her own borders expired with the loss of freedom, and the work done by the Pioneers of Evolution in Greece was to be resumed elsewhere. In the few years of the pre* Christian period that remained, the teaching of Empedocles, and of Epicurus as the mouthpiece of the atomic theory, was revived by Lucretius in his De Re-rum. Natura. Of that remarkable man but little is recorded, and the record is un­ trustworthy. He was probably born 99 b.c. and died—-by his own hand, Jerome says, but of this there is no proof—in his forty-fourth year. It is difficult, taking up his wonderful poem, to resist temptation to make copious extracts from it, since, even through the vehicle of Mr. Munro’s exquisite translation, it is probably little known to the general reader in these evil days of snippety literature. But the temptation must be resisted save in moderate degree. With the dignity which his high mission inspires, Lucretius appeals to us in the threefold character of teacher, reformer, and poet. “ First, by reason of the greatness of my argument, and because I set the mind free from the close-drawn bonds of superstition; and next because, on so dark a theme, I compose such lucid verse, touching every point with the grace of poesy.” As a teacher he expounds the doctrines of Epicurus concerning life and nature; as a reformer he attacks superstition; as a poet he informs both the atomic philo­ sophy and its moral application with harmonious and beautiful verse swayed by a fervour that is akin to religious emotion. c �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION Discussing at the outset various theories of origins, and dismissing these, notably that which asserts that things came from nothing—for, if so, “ any kind might be born of anything, nothing would require seed,” Lucretius proceeds to expound the teaching of Leucippus and other atomists as to the constitution of things by particles of matter ruled in their move­ ments by unvarying laws. This theory he works all round, explaining the pro­ cesses by which the atoms unite to carry on the birth, growth, and decay of things, the variety of which is due to variety of form of the atoms and to differences in modes of their combina­ tion; the combinations being determined by the affinities or properties of the atoms themselves, “since it is absolutely decreed, what each thing can and what it cannot do, by the conditions of nature.” Change is the law of the uni­ verse ; what is, will perish, but only to reappear in another form. Death is “ the only immortal and it is that and what may follow it which are the chief tormentors of men. “This terror of the soul, therefore, and this darkness, must be dispelled, not by the rays of the sun or the bright shafts of day, but by the outward aspect and harmonious plan of nature.” Lucretius explains that’ the soul, which he places in the centre of the breast, is also formed of very minute atoms of heat, wind, calm air, and a finer essence, the proportions of which determine the character of both men and animals. It dies with the body, in support of which statement Lucretius advances seventeen arguments, so deter­ mined is he to “ deliver those who through fear of death are all their life­ time subject to bondage.” These themes fill the first three books. In the fourth he grapples with the mental problems of sensation and conception, and explains the origin of belief in immortality as due to ghosts and appari­ tions which appear in dreams. “ When sleep has prostrated the body, for no other reason does the mind’s intelligence wake, except because the very same images provoke our minds which provoke them when we are awake, and to such a degree that we seem without a doubt to perceive him whom life has left, and death and earth gotten hold of. This nature constrains to come to pass be­ cause all the senses of the body are then hampered and at rest throughout the limbs, and cannot refute the unreal by real things” (cf. bk. i. 134, 135; iv. 462468; v. 1169-1176.). In the fifth book Lucretius deals with origins—of the sun, the moon, the earth (which he held to be flat, denying the existence of the antipodes); of life and its development; and of civilisation. In all this he excludes design, explaining everything as produced and maintained by natural agents; “the masses, suddenly brought together, became the rudiments of earth, sea, and heaven, and the race of living things.” He believed in the successive appearance of plants and ani­ mals, but in their arising separately and directly out of the earth, “under the influence of rain and the heat of the sun,” thus repeating the old speculations of the emergence of life from slime, “ wherefore the earth with good title has gotten and keeps the name of mother.” He did not adopt Empedocles’ theory of the “ four roots of all things,” and he will have none of the monsters—the hippogriffs, chimeras, and centaurs— which form a part of the scheme of that philosopher. These, he says, “ have never existed,” thus showing himself far in advance of ages when unicorns, dragons, and suchlike fabled beasts were seriously believed to exist. In one re­ spect, more discerning than Aristotle, he accepts the doctrine of the survival of the fittest as taught by the sage of Agrigentum. For he argues that since upon “the increase of some nature set a ban, so that they could not reach the coveted flower of age, nor find food, nor be united in marriage....... many races of living things have died out, and been unable to beget and continue their breed.” Lucretius speaks of Empedocles in terms scarcely less exaggerated than those �THALES TO LUCRETIUS which he applied to Epicurus. The latter is “ a god who first found out that plan of life which is now termed wisdom, and who by tried skill rescued life from such great billows and such thick dark­ ness, and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so brilliant a light....... he cleared men’s breasts with truth-telling precepts, and fixed a limit to lust and fear, and explained what was the chief good which we all strive to reach.” As to Empedocles, “that great country (Sicily) seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, marvellous, and dear. The verses, too, of this god-like genius cry with a loud voice, and make known his great discoveries, so that he seems scarcely born of a mortal stock.” Continuing his speculations on the development of living things, Lucretius strikes out in bolder and original vein. The past history of man, he says, lies in no heroic or golden age, but in one of struggle out of savagery. Only when “ children, by their coaxing ways, easily broke down the proud temper of their fathers,” did there arise the family ties out of which the wider social bond has grown, and softening and civilising agencies begin their fair offices. In his battle for food and shelter, “man’s first arms were hands, nails and teeth and stones and boughs broken of from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they had become known. Afterwards the force of iron and copper was dis­ covered, and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater quantity. With copper they would labour the soil of the earth and stir up the billows of war........ Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained ground, and the make of the copper sickle became a byword, and with iron they began to plough through the earth’s soil, and the struggles of wavering man were rendered equal.” As to language “ nature impelled them to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.” Thus j 19 does Lucretius point the road along which physical and mental evolution have since travelled, and make the whole story subordinate to the high purpose of his poem in deliverance of the beings, whose career he thus traces, from super­ stition. Man, “ seeing the system of heaven and the different seasons of the years, could not find out by what causes this was done, and sought refuge in handing over all things to the gods and supposing all things to be guided by their nod.” Then, in the sixth and last book, the completion of which would seem to have been arrested by his death, Lucretius explains the “law of winds and storms,” of earthquakes and volcanic outbursts, which men “foolishly lay to the charge of the gods,” who thereby make known their anger. So, loath to suffer mute, We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear ; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily. And what a motley crowd of gods they were on whose caprice or in­ difference he pours his vials of anger and contempt ! The tolerant pantheon of Rome gave welcome to any foreign deity with respectable credentials; to Cybele, the Great Mother, imported in the shape of a rough-hewn stone with pomp and rejoicings from Phrygia 204 b.c. ; to Isis, welcomed from Egypt; to Herakles, Demeter, Asklepios, and many another god from Greece. But these were dismissed from a man’s thought when the prayer or sacrifice to them had been offered at the due season. They had less influence on the Roman’s life than the crowd of native godlings who were thinly-disguised fetishes, and who controlled every action of the day. For the minor gods survive the changes in the pantheon of every race. Of the Greek peasant of to-day Mr. Rennell Rodd testifies, in his Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as he would shudder at the accusation of any taint of paganism, the ruling of the Fates is more immediately real to him than �20 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION divine omnipotence. Mr. Tozer con­ firms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says : “ It is rather the minor deities and those associated with man’s ordinary life that have escaped the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim twilight of popular belief.” In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us that “ even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which represents the almighty powers of creation, preservation, and destruction, have long ceased to preside actively over any such corresponding distribution of functions.” Like limited monarchs, they reign, but do not govern. They are superseded by the ever-increasing crowd of godlings whose influence is personal and special, as shown by Mr. Crooke in his instruc­ tive Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India. The old Roman catalogue of spiritual beings, abstractions as they were, who guarded life in minute detail, is a long one. From the indigitamenta, as such lists are called, we learn that no less than forty-three were concerned with the actions of a child. When the farmer asked Mother Earth for a good harvest, the prayer would not avail unless he also invoked “the spirit of breaking up the land and the spirit of ploughing it crosswise; the spirit of furrowing and the spirit of ploughing in the seed ; and the spirit of harrowing; the spirit of weeding and the spirit of reaping; the spirit of carrying corn to the barn; and the spirit of bringing it out again.” The country, moreover, swarmed with Chaldaean astrologers and casters of nativities ; with Etruscan haruspices full of “childish lightning­ lore,” who foretold events from the entrails of sacrificed animals ; while in competition with these there was the State-supported college of augurs to divine the will of the gods by the cries, and direction of the flight, of birds. 'Well might the satirist of such a time say that the “ place was so densely populated with gods as to leave hardly room for the men.” It will be seen that the justification I for including Lucretius among the Pioneers of Evolution lies in his two signal and momentous contributions to the science of man ; namely, the primitive savagery of the human race, and the origin of the belief in a soul and a future life. Concerning the first, anthropological research, in its vast accumulation of materials during the last sixty years, has done little more than fill in the outline which the insight of Lucretius enabled him to sketch. As to the second, he anticipates, well-nigh in detail, the ghost-theory of the origin of belief in spirits generally which Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor, follow­ ing the lines laid down by Hume and Turgot (see Part IV., sec. 3), have formu­ lated, and sustained by an enormous mass of evidence. The credit thus due to Lucretius for the original ideas in his majestic poem—Greek in conception, and Roman in execution—has been ob­ scured in the general eclipse which that poem suffered for centuries through its anti-theological spirit. Grinding at the same philosophical mill, Aristotle, be­ cause of the theism assumed to be in­ volved in his “perfecting principle,” was cited as “ a pillar of the faith ” by the Fathers and Schoolmen; while Lucre­ tius, because of his denial of design, was “anathema maranatha.” Only in these days, when the far-reaching effects of the Theory of Evolution, supported by observation in every branch of en­ quiry, are apparent, are the merits of Lucretius as an original seer, more than as an expounder of the teachings of Empedocles and Epicurus, made clear. Standing well-nigh on the threshold of the Christian era, we may pause to ask what is the sum of the speculation into the causes and nature of things which, begun in Ionia (with impulse more or less slight from the East, in the sixth cen­ tury before Christ) by Thales, ceased, for many centuries, in the poem of Lucre­ tius, thus covering an active period of about five hundred years. The caution not to see in these speculations more �THALES Tü HTCRET/US 2f than an approximate approach to modern phenomena as due to the antagonism of repelling and attracting modes of motion ; theories must be kept in mind. 1. There is a primary substance which when the latter overcome the former, abides amidst the general flux of things. equilibrium will be reached, and the All modern research tends to shozv that present state of things will come to an the various combinations of matter are end. 6. Water is a necessary condition of formed of some prima materia. But its life. ultimate nature remains unknown. Therefore life had its beginnings tn 2. Out of nothing comes nothing. Modern science knows nothing of a water; a theory wholly endorsed ¿p' beginning, and, moreover, holds it to be modern biology’. 7. Life arose out of non-living matter. unthinkable. In this it stands in direct Although modern biology leaves the opposition to the theological dogma that God created the universe out of nothing ; origin of life as an insoluble problem, it a dogma still accepted by the majority of supports the theory of fundamental con­ Prostestants and binding on Roman tinuity between the inorganic and the Catholics. For the doctrine of the Church organic. 8. Plants came before animals : the of Rome thereon, as expressed in the Canons of the Vatican Council, is as higher organisms are of separate sex, and follows:—“ If any one confesses not that appeared subsequent to the lower. Generally confirmed by modern biology, the world and all things which are con­ tained in it, both spiritual and mental, but with qualification as to the undefined have been, in their whole substance, pro­ borderland between the lowest plants and duced by God out of nothing; or shall the lowest animals. And, of course, say that God created, not by His free will recognises a continuity in the order and from all necessity, but by a necessity equal succession of life which was not to the necessity whereby He loves Himself, by the Greeks. Aristotle and others be­ or shall deny that the world was made fore him believed that some of the higher for the glory of God: let him be forms sprang from slimy matter direct. 9. Adverse conditions cause the ex­ anathema! 3. The primary substance is inde­ tinction of some organisms, thus leaving ] room for those better fitted. structible. Herein lay the crude germ of the modem 1 The modern doctrine of the Conserva­ tion of Energy teaches that both matter doctrine of the “ survival of the fittest! 10. Man was the last to appear, and and motion can neither be created nor his primitive state was one of savagery. 1 destroyed. 4. The universe is made up of indi­ His first tools and weapons were of visible particles called atoms, whose stone; then, after the discovery of manifold combinations, ruled by un­ metals, of copper; and, following that, of alterable affinities, result in the variety iron. His body and soul are alike com­ pounded of atoms, and the soul is ex- J of things. With modifications based on chemical as tinguished at death. The science of Prehistoric Archeology 1 well as mechanical changes among the atoms, this theory of leucippus and Demo­ confirms the theory of mads slow passage 1 critus is confirmed. (But recent experi­ from barbarism to civilisation; and the ments and discoveries show that recon­ science of Comparative Psychology declares struction of chemical theories as to the that the evidence of his immortality is 1 neither stronger nor weaker than the I Properties of the atom may happen.) 5. Change is the law of things, and is evidence of the immortality of the lower 1 brought about by the play of opposing animals. forces. Modern science explains the changes in Such, in very broad outline, is the �22 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION legacy of suggestive theories bequeathed by the Ionian school and its successors, theories which fell into the rear when Athens became a centre of intellectual life in which discussion passed from the physical to those ethical problems which lie outside the range of this survey. Although Aristotle, by his prolonged and careful observations, forms a con­ spicuous exception, the fact abides that insight, rather than experiment, ruled Greek speculation, the fantastic guesses of parts of which themselves evidence the survival of the crude and false ideas about earth and sky long prevailing. The more wonderful is it, therefore, that so much therein points the way along which inquiry travelled after its subsequent long arrest; and the more apparent is it that nothing in the history of science or art, and but little in theo­ logical speculations, at least among us Westerns, can be understood without reference to Greece. TABLE Name. Thales Anaximander Anaximenes Pythagoras Xenophanes Heraclitus Empedocles Anaxagoras Leucippus Democritus Aristotle Epicurus Lucretius Place. Miletus (Ionia) 5> 5? Samos (near the Ionian coast) Approximate Date 15. C. 6oo 570 500 500 Speciality. Cosmological Theory as tol . the Primary Substance iWater the Boundless Air Numbers: “ a Cosmos built up of geometrical fig­ ures,” or (Grote, Plato, x. 12) “generated out of num­ ber.” Colophon (Ionia) Ephesus (Ionia) Agrigentum (Sicily) 500 450 Fire, Air, Earth, and Water : ruled by Love and Strife . Clazomenae (Ionia) 450 Nous Abdera (Thrace) Stagira (Macedonia) Samos Rome i'ounder of the Eleatic School Fire 500 460 350 ¡-Formulators of the Atomic Theory !Naturalist 300 Expounder of the Atomic Theory and ethical philosopher 50 Interpreter of Epicurus and Empedocles : the first Anthropologist �PART II THE ARREST OF INQUIRY A.D. 50-A.D. 400 i. From the Early Christian Period to the Time of Augustine “A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it. The result of science is not to banish the divine altogether, but ever to place it at a greater distance from the world of particular facts in which men once believed they saw it.”—Renan, Essay on Islamism and Science. A detailed account of the rise and progress of the Christian religion is not within the scope of this book. But as that religion, more especially in the elaborated theological form which it , ultimately assumed, became the chief barrier to the development of Greek ideas; except, as has been remarked, in the degree that these were represented by Aristotle, and brought into harmony with it; a short survey of its origin and early stages is necessary to the continuity of our story. The history of that great movement is told according to the bias of the writers. They explain its rapid diffusion and its ultimate triumph over Paganism as due either to its divine origin and guidance, or to the favourable conditions of the time of its early propagation, and to that wise adaptation to circumstances which linked its fortunes with those of the progressive peoples of Western Europe. In the judgment of every unofficial narrator, this latter explanation best accords with the facts of history, and with the natural causes which largely determine success or failure. The most partisan advocates of its supernatural,' and, therefore, special, character, have to show reason why the fortunes of the Christian religion have varied like those of other great religions, both older and younger than it; why, like Buddhism, it i has been ousted from the country in which it rose; and why, in competition with Brahmanism, as Sir Alfred Lyall testifies in his Asiatic Studies (p. no), and with Mohammedanism in Africa, it has less success than these in the mission fields where it comes into rivalry with them. Riven into wrangling sects from an early period of its history, it has, while exercising a beneficent influence in turbulent and lawless ages3 brought not “peace on earth, but a' sword.” It has been the cause of un­ dying hate, of bloody wars, and of persecutions between parties and nations, whose animosity seems the deeper when stirred by matters which are incapable! of proof. As Montaigne says, “ Nothing! is so firmly believed as that which is least known.” To bring the Christian religion, or, rather, its manifold forms, from the purest spiritualistic to such degraded type as exists, for example, in j Abyssinia, within the operation of the law which governs development, and which, therefore, includes partial and local corruption, is to make its history as clear as it is profoundly instructive; while to demand for it an origin and character different in kind from other religions is to import confusion into the story of mankind, and to raise a swarm of artificial difficulties. “If,” as John Morley observes in his criticism of �24 PIONEEPS OF E VOL UTION Turgot’s dissertation upon “The Ad­ vantages that the Establishment of Christianity has conferred upon the Human Race” (Miscell., ii. 90), “there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing quality so con­ stantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral regeneration as it was for political health and vitality; while in the Western part it became the organ of the most im­ portant of all the past transformations of the civilised world? Is not the differ­ ence to be explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the Christian idea?” Its inclusion as one of other modes, varying only in degree, by which man has progressed from the “ape and tiger” stage to the highest ideals of the race, makes clear what concerns us here—namely, its attitude towards secular knowledge, and the consequent serious arrest of that know­ ledge. That a religion which its followers claim to be of supernatural origin, and secured from error by the perpetual guidance of a Holy Spirit, should have opposed inquiry into matters the faculty for investigating which lay within human power and province; that it should actually have put to death those who dared thus to inquire, and to make known what they had discovered; is a problem which its advocates may settle among themselves. It is no problem to those who take the opposite view. In outlining the history of Christianity stress will be here laid only upon those elements which caused it to be an arresting force in man’s intellectual development, and, therefore, in his spiritual emancipation from terrors be­ gotten of ignorance. It does not fall within our survey to speak of that primary element in it which was before all dogma, and which may survive when dogma has become only a matter of antiquarian interest. That element, born of emotion which, as a crowd of ' kindred examples show, incarnates and then deifies the object of its worship, was the belief in the manifestation of the divine through the human Jesus who had borne men’s griefs, carried their sorrows, and offered rest to the weary and heavy-laden. For no religion—and here Evolution comes in as witness— can take root which does not adapt itself to, and answer some need of, the heart of man. Hence the importance of study of the history of all religions. Evolution knows only one heresy—the denial of continuity. Recognising the present as the outcome of the past, it searches after origins. It knows that that which revolts us in man’s spiritual history has, alike with that which attracts, its place, its necessary place, in the development of ideas, and is, therefore, capable of explanation from its roots upwards. For this age is. sympathetic, not flippant. It looks with no favour on criticism that is only, destructive, or on ridicule or ribaldry as modes of attack on current beliefs. Hence we have the modern science of comparative theology, with its Hibbert Lectures, and Gifford Lectures, which are critical and constructive ; as opposed to Bampton Lectures, Boyle and Hulse Lectures, which are apologetic, the speaker holding an official brief. Of the Boyle Lectures, Collins the “ Deist ” caustically said that nobody doubted the existence of the Deity till they set to work to prove it. Religions are no longer treated as true or false, as in­ ventions of priests or of divine origin, but as the product of man’s intellectual speculations, however crude or coarse; and of his spiritual needs, no matter in what repulsive form they are satisfied. For “ proofs ” and “ evidences ” we have substituted explanations. Nevertheless, so strong, often so bitter, are the feelings aroused over the most temperate dis­ cussion of the origin of Christianity that it remains necessary to repeat that to explain is not to attack, and that to narrate is not to apportion blame. For no religion can do aught than reflect the �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY 25 temper of the age in which it flourishes. from home was the preaching of an Let us now summarise certain occur­ enthusiastic ascetic named John the rences which, although familiar enough, Baptist. At his hands Jesus sub­ must be repeated for the clear under­ mitted to the baptismal rite, and then entered on his career, wandering from standing of their effects. Some sixty years after the death of place to place. The fragments of his Lucretius there happened, in the sub­ discourses, which have survived in the sequent belief of millions of mankind, short biographies known as the Gospels, an event for which all that had gone show him to have been gifted with a before in the history of this planet is simple, winning style, and his sermons» said to have been a preparation. In brightened by happy illustration or the fulness of time the Omnipotent striking parable, went home to the hearts maker and ruler of a universe to which of his hearers. Women, often of the no boundaries can be set by human outcast class, were drawn to him by the thought, sent to this earth-speck no less sympathy which attracted even more a person than His Eternal Son. He than his teaching. Among a people was said to have been born, not by the to whom the unvarying order of nature natural processes of generation, but to was an idea wholly foreign—for Greek have been incarnated in the womb of a speculations had not penetrated into virgin, retaining his divine nature while Palestine—stories of miracle-working Subjecting it to human limitations. found easy credit, falling-in, as they did, This he had done that he might, as sin­ with popular belief in the constant in­ less man, become an expiatory sacrifice tervention of deity. Thus to the reports to offended deity, and to the require­ of what Jesus taught were added those ments of divine justice, for the sins of the wonders which he had wrought, which the human race had committed from feeding thousands of folk with a since the transgression of Adam and few loaves of bread to raising the dead Eve, or which men yet to be born might to life. His itinerant mission secured him a few devoted followers from various commit. The “ miraculous ” birth of Jesus took towns and villages ; while the effect of place at Nazareth in Galilee, in the success upon himself was to heighten his reign of Caesar Augustus, about 750 own conception of the importance of his work. The skill of the Romans in fusing a.u.c. as the Romans reckoned time. Tradition afterwards fixed his birthday together subject-races had failed them in on the 25th December, which, curiously the case of the Jews, whose belief in enough, although, perhaps, explaining their special place in the world as the the choice, was the day dedicated to the “ chosen people ” never forsook them. sun-god Mithra, an Oriental deity to Nor had their misfortunes weakened whom altars had been raised and their belief that the Messiah predicted sacrifices performed, with rites of bap­ by their prophets would appear to deliver them, and plant their feet on the neck tisms of blood, in hospitable Rome. Jesus is said to have lived in the of the hated conqueror. This hope, as obscurity of his native mountain village became a pious Jew, Jesus shared, but till his thirtieth year. Except one it set him brooding on some nobler, doubtful story of his going to Jerusalem because more spiritual, conception of it with his parents when he was twelve than his fellow-countrymen nurtured. years old, nothing is recorded in the Finally, it led him to the belief, fostered various biographies of him between his by the ambition of his nearer disciples, birth and his appearance as a public which was, however, material in its hopes, teacher. Probably he followed his that he was the spiritual Messiah. In father’s trade as a carpenter. The that faith he repaired to Jerusalem at the event that seems to have called him time of the Passover feast when the city �2Ô PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION was crowded with devotees, that he might, before the chief priests and elders, make his appeal to the nation. According to the story, his daring in clearing the holy temple of moneychangers and traders led to his appearance before the Sanhedrin, the highest judicial council; his plain­ ness of speech raised the fury of the sects; and when, dreaming of a purer faith, he spoke ominous words about the destruction of the temple, the charge of blasphemy was laid against him. His guilt was made clear to his judges when, answering a question of the high priest, he declared himself to be the Messiah. This, involving claim to kingship over the Jews, and therefore rebellion against the Empire, was made the plea of haling him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for trial. Pilate, looking upon the whole affair as a local ¿meute, was disinclined to severity, but nothing short of the death of Jesus as a blasphemer (although his chief offence appears to have been his disclaimer of earthly sovereignty) would satisfy the angry mob. Amidst their taunts and jeers he was taken to a place named Calvary, and there put to death by the torturing process of crucifixion, or, the particular mode not being clear, of transfixion on a stake. The tragic event, on which, as is still widely held, hang the destinies of man­ kind to the end of time, attracted no attention outside Judsea. In the Roman eye, cold, contemptuous, and practical, it was but the execution of a troublesome fanatic who had embroiled himself with his fellow-countrymen, and added the crime of sedition to the folly of blas­ phemy. Pilate himself passed on, without more ado, to the next duty. Tradition, anxious to prove that retribu­ tion followed his criminal act, as it was judged in after-time to be, tells how he flung himself in remorse from the moun­ tain known as Pilatus, which overlooks the lake of Lucerne. With truer insight, a striking modern story, EEtui de Nacre, by Anatole France, makes Pilate, on his retirement to Sicily in old age, thus refer to the incident in conversation with a Roman friend who had loved a Jewish maiden :— “ A few months after I had lost sight of her I heard by accident that she had joined a small party of men and women who were following a young Galilean miracle-worker. His name was Jesus, he came from Nazareth, and he was crucified for I don’t know what crime. Pontius, do you remember this man?” Pontius Pilate knit his brow, and put his hand to his forehead like one who is searching his memory; then, after a few moments of silence : “Jesus,” murmured he, “Jesus of Nazareth. No, I don’t remember him.” On the third day after his death Jesus is said to have risen from the grave, and appeared to a faithful few of his disciples. On the fortieth day after his resurrection he is said to have ascended to heaven. Both these statements rest on the authority of the biographies which were compiled some years after his death. Jesus wrote nothing himself; therefore the “brethren,” as his intimate followers called one another, had no other sacred books than those of the Old Testament. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in Daniel and some of the apocryphal writings, and they cherished certain “ logia ” or sayings of his which formed the basis of the first three Gospels. The earliest of these, that bearing the name of Mark, probably took the shape in which we have it (some spurious verses at the end excepted) about 70 a.d. The fourth Gospel, which tradition attributes to John, is generally believed to be half a century later than Mark. It seems likely that the impor­ tance of collecting the words of Jesus into any permanent form did not occur to those who had heard them, because * the belief in his speedy return was allpowerful among them, and their life and attitude towards everything shaped accordingly. Without sacred books, priesthood, or organisation, these earliest disciples, whom the fate of the leader had driven into hiding for a time, gathered them­ selves into groups for communion and worship. “ In the church of Jeru­ salem,” says Selden in his Table Talk �The arrest of inquiry (xiv.), “the Christians were but another sect of Jews that did believe the Messias was come.” From that sacred city there went forth preachers of this simple doc­ trine through the lands where Greek­ speaking Jews, known as those of the Dispersion, had been long settled. These formed a very important element in the Roman Empire, being scattered from Asia Minor to Egypt, and thence in all the lands washed by the Mediter­ ranean. As their racial isolation and national hopes made them the least contented among the subject-peoples, a series of tolerant measures securing them certain privileges, subject to loyal be­ haviour, had been prudently granted by their Roman masters. The new teaching spread from Antioch to Alexandria and Rome. But early in the onward career of the movement a division broke out among the immediate disciples of Jesus which ended in lasting rupture. A dis­ tinguished convert had been won to the faith in the person of the Apostle Paul. He is the real founder of Chris­ tianity as a more or less systematised creed, and all the developments of dogma which followed are integral parts of the structure raised by him. He converted it from a local religion into a widespread faith. This came about, at the start, through his defeat of the narrower section headed by Peter, who would have compelled all non-Jewish con­ verts to submit to the rite of circum­ cision. The unity of the Empire gave Chris­ tianity its chance. Through the con­ nection of Eurasia from the Euphrates to the Atlantic by magnificent roads, com­ munication between peoples followed the lines of least resistance. Happily for the future of Christianity, the early missionaries travelled westward, in the wake of the dispersed Jews, along the Mediterranean seaboard, and thus its fortunes became identified with the civi­ lising portion of mankind. Had they travelled eastward, it might have been blended with Buddhism, or, as its Gnostic phases show, become merged in Oriental mysticism. The story of progress ran smoothly till a.d. 64, when we first hear of the “Christians”—-for by such name they had become known —in “ profane ” history, as it was once oddly called. Tacitus, writing many years after the event, tells how on the night of the 18th July, in the sixty-fourth year of our era, a fierce fire broke out in Rome, causing the drestruction of magnificent buildings raised by Augustus, and of priceless works of Greek art. Suspicion fell on Nero, and he, as has been suggested, was instigated by his wife Poppaea Sabina, an unscrupulous woman, and, according to some authorities, a convert to Judaism, “to put an end to the common talk, by imputing the fire to others, visiting, with a- refinement of punishment, those detestable criminals who went by the name of Christians. The author of that denomination was Christus, who had been executed in the time of Tiberius, by the procurator, Pontius Pilate.” Tacitus goes on to describe Christianity as “a pestilent superstition,” and its adherents as guilty of “hatred to the human race.” The indictment, on the face of it, seems strange, but it has an explanation, although the Christians were brutally murdered on the charge of arson, and not of superstition. So far as religious persecution went, they suffered this first at the hands of Jews, the Empire inter­ vening to protect them. Broadly speak­ ing, the Roman note was toleration. Throughout the Empire religion was a national affair, because it began and ended with the preservation of the State. Thereupon it was the binding duty— religio—of every citizen to pay due honour to the protecting gods on whose favour the safety of the State depended. That done, a man might believe what he chose. Polytheism is, from its nature, easy-going and tolerant; so long as there was no open opposition to the authorised public worship, the wor­ shipper could explain it any way he chose. In Greece a man “might believe or disbelieve that the Mysteries taught �28 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION the doctrine of immortality; the essen­ tial thing was that he should duly sacrifice his pig.” In Rome, that vast Cosmopolis, “the ordinary pagan did not care two straws whether his neigh­ bour worshipped twenty gods or twentyone.” Why should he care ? Now, against all this the Christians set their faces sternly, and the result was to make them regarded as anti-patriotic and anti-social. Their success among the lower classes had been rapid. Chris­ tianity levelled all distinctions: it welcomed the master and his slave, the outcast and the pure : it treated woman as the spiritual equal of man: it held out to each the hope of a future life. Thus far all was to the good, although the old Mithraic religion had done wellnigh as much. But Christianity held aloof from the common social life, putting itself out of touch with the mani­ fold activity of Rome. It sought to apply certain maxims of Jesus literally ; it discouraged marriage, it brought dis­ union into family life; it counselled avoidance of service in the army or accep­ tance of any public office. This general attitude was wholly due to the belief that with the return of Jesus the end of the world was at hand. For Jesus had foretold his second coming, and the earliest epistles of the apostles bade the faithful prepare for it. Here there was no continuing city; citizenship was in heaven, for the kingdom of Christ was not of this world. Therefore to give thought to the earthly and fleeting was folly and impiety, for who would care to heap up wealth, to strive for place or to pursue pleasure, or to search after what men call “wisdom,” when these im­ perilled the soul, and blocked the way to heaven? The prejudice created by this belief, expressed in such direct action as refusal to worship the guardian gods and the “genius ” of the Emperor, was deepened by ugly, although baseless, rumours as to the cruel and immoral things done by the Christians at their secret meetings. And so it came to pass that Tacitus spoke J of Christianity in the terms quoted; that Epictetus and AJarcus Aurelius (who refers to it only once in his Meditations) dismissed it with a scornful phrase ; that the common people called it atheistic; that, finally, it became a proscribed and persecuted religion. Further than this there is no need to pursue its career until, with wholly changed fortunes, we meet it as a tolerated religion under a so called Christian Emperor. The object in tracing it thus far is to indicate how enthusiasts, thus filled with an anti-worldly spirit, would become and remain an arresting force against the advance of inquiry and, therefore, of knowledge; and how, as their religion gathered power, and itself became worldly in policy, it would the more strongly assert supremacy over the reason. For intellectual activity would lead to inquiry into the claims and authority of the Church, and inquiry, therefore, was the thing to be proscribed. Then, too, the committal of the floating biographies of Jesus to written form, and their grouping, with the letters of the apostles, into one more or less complete collection, to be afterwards called the New Testament (a collection held to embrace, as the theory of inspiration be­ came formulated, all that it is needful for man to know), would create a further barrier against intellectual activity. Then, as Christianity came into nearer touch with the enfeebled remnants of Greek philosophy, and with other foreign in­ fluences shaping its dogmas, discussions about the person of Christ became active. The simple fluent creed of the early Christians took rigid form in the sub­ tleties of the Nicene Creed, and as “Very God of Very God” the final appeal was, logically, to the words of Jesus. Hence another barrier against inquiry. Conflict has never arisen on the ethical sayings of Jesus, which, making allowance for the impracticableness of a few, place him high among the sages of antiquity. Comparing their teaching with his, it is easy to group together maxims which do not yield to the more famous examples �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY in the Sermon on the Mount as guides to conduct, or as inspiration to high ideals. The “golden rule” is anticipated by Plato’s “Thou shalt not take that which is mine, and may I do to others as I would that they should do to me ” (Jowett, Trans, v. 483). And it is paralleled by Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, in these words, which he puts into the mouth of King Nicocles, when addressing governors: “You should be to others what you think I should be to you.” But if there was nothing new in what Jesus taught, there was freshness in the method. Conflict is waged only over statements the nature and limits of which might be expected from the place and age when they were delivered. They who hold that Jesus was God the Son Eternal, and therefore incapable of error, may reconcile, as best they can with this, his belief in the mischievous delusions ■of his time. If they say that so much of this as may be reported in the records of his life are spurious, they throw the whole contents of the gospels into the melting-pot of criticism. Taking the narratives as we have them, documents stamped with the hall-mark of the centuries, “declaring,” as a body of clergymen proclaimed recently, “incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled,” we learn that Jesus accepted the accuracy of the sacred writings of his people ; that he spoke of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch .; that he referred to its legends as dealing with historical persons, and as reporting actual events. All these beliefs are refuted by the critical scholarship of to­ day. We need not go to Germany for the verdict; it is endorsed by eminent Hebraists, officials of the Church of England. Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, says that, “ like other people, the Jews formed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man”; that “they either did this for themselves, or borrowed from their neighbours,” and that “of the theories j 29 current in Assyria and Phoenicia frag­ ments have been preserved which exhibit parts of resemblance to the Bible narra­ tives sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of traditions.” If, therefore, the cosmogonic and other legends are in­ spired, so must also the common original of these and their corresponding stories be inspired. The matter might be pursued through .the patriarchal age to the eve of the Exodus, showing that here also the mythical element is domi­ nant, the existence of Abraham him­ self dissolving in the solution of the “higher criticism.” As to the Pentateuch, the larger number of scholars place its composition, in the form in which we have it—older documents being blended therein—about the sixth and fifth cen­ turies B.C. Jesus spoke of the earth as if it were flat, and the most important among the heavenly bodies. Knowledge of the active speculations that went on centuries before his time on the Ionian seaboard; prevision of what secrets men would wrest from the stars centuries hence-—of neither did he dream. That Homer and Virgil had sung; that Plato had dis­ coursed ; that Buddha had founded a religion with which his, when Western activity met Eastern passivity, would vainly compete ; these, and aught else that had moved the great world without, were unknown to the Syrian teacher. Jesus believed in an arch-fiend, who was permitted by Omnipotence, the Omnipotence against which he had re­ belled, to set loose countless numbers of evil spirits to work havoc on men and animals. Jesus also believed in a hell of eternal torment for the wicked, and in a heaven of unending happiness for the good. There is no surer index of the intellectual stage of any people than the degree in which belief in the supernatural, and especially in the activity of super­ natural agents, rules their lives. . The lower we descend, the more detailed and familiar is the assumption of knowledge of the behaviour of these agents, and of �PIONEERS OP EVOLUTION the nature of the places they come from or haunt. Of this, mediaeval speculations on demonology, and modern books of anthropology, supply any number of examples. Here we are concerned only with the momentous fact that belief in demoniacal activity pervades the New Testament from beginning to end, and, therefore, gave the warrant for the un­ speakable cruelties with which that belief has stained the annals of Christendom. John Wesley was consistent when he wrote that “ Giving up the belief in witch­ craft was in effect giving up the Bible,” and it may be added that giving up belief in the devil is, practically, giving up belief in the atonement—the central doctrine of the Christian faith. To this the early Christians would have sub­ scribed : so, also, would the great Augustine, who said that “ nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind”; so would all who have followed him in ancient confessions of the faith. It is only the amorphous form of that faith which, lingering on, anaemic and bone­ less, denies by evasion. But they who abandon belief in male­ ficent demons and witches; as also, for this follows, in beneficent agents, as angels; land themselves in serious dilemma. For to this are such com­ mitted. If Jesus, who came “that he might destroy the works of the devil,” and who is reported, among other proofs of his divine ministry, to have cast out demons from “possessed” human beings, and, in one case, to have permitted a crowd of the infernal agents to enter into a herd of swine; if he verily believed that he actually did these things; and if it be true that the belief is a superstition limited to the ignorant or barbaric mind; what value can be attached to any state­ ment that Jesus is reported to have made about a spiritual world ? Here then (i) in the attitude of the early Christians towards all mundane affairs as of no moment compared with those affecting their soul’s salvation; (2) j in the assumed authority of Scripture as a full. revelation of both earthly and heavenly things, and (3) in the assumed infallibility of the words of Jesus reported therein; we have three factors Which suffice to explain why the great move­ ment towards discovery of the orderly relations of phenomena was arrested for centuries, and theories of capricious government of the universe sheltered and upheld. While, as has been said, the unity of the Empire secured Christianity its for­ tunate start; the multiform elements of which the Empire was made upphilosophic and pagan—being gradually absorbed by Christianity, secured it acceptance among the different subject­ peoples. The break-up of the Empire secured its supremacy. The absorption of foreign ideas and practices by Christianity, largely through the influence of Hellenic Jews, was an added cause of arrest of inquiry. The adoption of pagan rites and customs, resting, as these did, on the bed-rock of barbarism, dragged it to a lower level. The intrusion of philosophic subtleties led to terms being mistaken for explana­ tions : as Gibbon says, “ the pride of the professors and of their disciples was satisfied with the science of words.” The inchoate and mobile character of Christianity during the first three cen­ turies gave both influences—pagan and philosophic—their opportunity. For long years the converts scattered throughout the Empire were linked together, in more or less regular federation, by the acknow­ ledgment of Christ as Lord, and by the expectation of his second coming. There was no official priesthood, only overseers—episkopoi ” for social pur­ poses, who made no claims to apostolic succession; ho formulated set of doc­ trines ; no Apostles’ Creed ; no dogmas of baptismal regeneration or of the real presence; no worship or apotheosis of Mary as the Mother of God; no worship of saints or relics. On the philosophic side, it was the Greek influence in the person of the �W A RREST OF INQ UIRY more educated converts that shaped the dogmas of the Church and sought to blend them with the occult and mys­ terious elements in Oriental systems, of which modern “ Theosophy ” is the tenuous parody. That old Greek habit of asking questions, of seeking to reach the reason of things, which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to scientific inquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals to the Old Testament touched not the Greek as they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the New Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it may seem in view of the assumed divine origin of the Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took upon itself to decide which of them were, and which were not, an integral part of supernatural revelation. The ultimate verdict, so far as the Western Church was concerned, was delivered by the Council of Carthage in the early part of the fifth century. There arose a school of Apologists, founders of theology, who, to quote Gibbon, “equipped the Christian religion for the conquest of the Roman world by changing it into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. They mingled together the metaphysics of Platonism, the doc­ trine of the Logos, which came from the Stoics, morality partly Platonic, partly .Stoic, methods of argument and inter­ pretation learnt from Philo, with the pregnant maxims of Jesus and the reli­ gious language of the Christian congre­ gations.” Thus the road was opened for additions to dogmatic theology, doc­ trines of the Trinity, of the Virgin Birth, and whatever else could be inferentially extracted from the Scriptures, and blended with foreign ideas. The grow­ ing complexity of creed called for inter­ pretation of it, and this obviously fell to the overseers or bishops, chosen for their special gifts of “ the grace of the truth.” These met, as occasion required, to discuss subjects affecting the faith and discipline of the several groups. Among such, precedence, as a matter of course, would be accorded to the overseer of the most important Christian society in the 31 Empire ; and hence the prominence and authority, from an early period, of the bishop of Rome. In the simple and business-like act of his election as chair­ man of the gatherings lay the germ of the audacious and preposterous claims of the Papacy. On the pagan side, the course of de­ velopment is not so easily traced. To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now impossible ; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews ; and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire fitted-in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the Euphrates, to the Empire’s westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep - seated superstition. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of Chris­ tianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name. It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact set thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in antiquities of the type of Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the search after parallels, which have received astonishing confirmation in our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the “ arch­ deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices,” as the Romanist missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in �32 PIONEERS OF E VOL UTION Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected of him, recognises the continuity of ideas : “mutato nomine tantum ; Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as ‘the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,’ and the ’Atto0€wo-is of the Heathen surviving in the Canoni­ sation of Saints. The carrying of the Popes ‘by Switzers under a Canopie’ is a ‘ Relique of the Divine Honours given to Caesar ’; the carriage of Images in Procession ‘a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.’....... ‘The Heathen had also their Aqua Lustralis, that is to say, Holy Water. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their Holy Dayes. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our Wakes answering to them; They their Saturnalia, and we our Car­ nevalis and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about May-Poles; and Dancing is one kind of worship ; They had their Procession called Ambarvalia, and we our Procession about the Fields in the Rogation week.'” Middleton examined the matter on the spot, and in his celebrated Letter from Rome gives numerous examples of “an exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism.” Since few read his book nowadays, some of these may be cited, because their presence goes far to explain why the. conglomerate religion which Christianity had become was proof against ideas spurned alike by pagans and ecclesiastics. Visiting the place for classical study, and not “ to notice the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the present Religion,” Middleton soon found himself “still in old Heathen Rome ” with its rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed dow7n by an uninterrupted succession from the priests of old to the priests of new Rome. The ' “ smoak of the incense ” in the churches transports him to the temple of the Paphian Venus described by Virgil {gEneid, i. 420); the surpliced boy wait­ ing on the priest with the thurible reminds him of sculptures on ancient bas-reliefs representing heathen sacrifice, with a white-clad attendant on a priest holding a little chest or box in his hand. The use of holy water suggests numerous parallels. At the entrance to Pagan temples stood vases of holy liquid, a mixture of salt and common water; and, on bas-reliefs, the aspergillum or brush for the ceremony of sprinkling is carved. In the annual festival of the benediction of horses, when the animals were sent to the convent of St. Anthony to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus blest “for about eighteenpence of our money ”), there is the survival of a ceremony in the Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines of the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a passage in Herodotus as to the use of lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that lamps to the Madonna took the place of those before the images of the Lares, whose chapels stood at the corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 a.d.) forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day in cemeteries lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but the custom was too deeply-rooted to be abolished. As for votive offerings, Middleton truly says that “ no one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned by all their writers....... but the most common of all offerings were pictures representing the history of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouch­ safed upon the vow of the donor.” Of which offerings, the blessed Virgin is so sure always to carry off the greatest share that it may be truly said of her what Juvenal says of the Goddess Isis, whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in Rome, that the painters got their livelihood out of her. Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on “ Prognostica­ tions.” Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a friend : “ You, who think the gods take no care of human �TH£ ARREST OF INQUIRY affaire, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people, for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe into harbour?” “Yes,” answered Diagoras, I see how it is; for those are never painted who happen to be drowned.” There is nothing new under the sun. Horace {Odes, bk. i., v.) tells of the shipwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thankoffering in the temple of the sea-god who had preserved him ; Polydorus Vergil ius, who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century—that is, some 1,500 years after Horace— describes the classic custom of ex voto offerings at length, while Pennant the antiquary, describing the well of Saint Winifred in Flintshire in the last cen­ tury, tells of the votive offerings, in the shape of crutches and other objects, which were hung about it. To this day the store is receiving additions. The sick crowd thither as of old they crowded into the temples of ZEsculapius and Serapis; mothers bring their sick children Ms in Imperial Rome they took them to the Temple of Romulus and Remus. A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a plunge in the bath itself, is followed by prayers at the altar of the chapel which encloses the well. When the saint’s feast-day is held, the afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. Perhaps one of the most pathetic sights in Catholic churches, especially in out-of-the-way villages, is the altars on which are hung votive offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the worshipper has been delivered. As to the images, tricked-out in curious robes and gewgaws, Middleton “ could not help recollecting the picture which old Homer draws of Q. Hecuba of Troy, prostrating herself before the miraculous Image of Pallas,” while his wonder at tiie Loretto image of the “ Queen of Heaven ” with “ a face as black as a Negus” reminds him of the reference in Baruch to the idols black with the “perpetual smoak of lamps and incense.” 33 In his Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys refers to churches dedicated to Notre Dame in virtue of legends of discovery of images of the Virgin on the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the soil. Such a black “ Madonna ” was found near Grenoble, in the commune of La Zouche. Then, in the titles of the new deities, Middleton correctly sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the “great mother” of Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis, there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing examples of myths and misreadings through which certain “ saints ” have a place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the title of Saint Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone (Praefectu-S.), Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S. Veronica secured canonisation through a blunder over the words Vera Icon t still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a mantle ! The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition of some saint or angel, call to mind “ the impression of Hercules’ feet on a stone in Scythia”; the picture of the Virgin, which came from heaven, suggests the descent of Numa’s shield “from the clouds that of the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the lique­ faction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that “the frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of fire” {Sat. v. 97-100). Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on these D �34 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION suggestive classic or pagan parallels to Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had probed a comparatively recent layer; since, far beneath, lay the un­ suspected prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and composed of, man’s earliest speculations about himself and his surroundings. When, however, we borrow an illustration from geology, it must be remembered that our divisions, like those into which the strata of the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no real detachment. The difference between former and present methods of research is that now­ adays we have gone further down for discovery of the common materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilised ideas are compounded. They arise in the comparison which exists in the savage mind between the living and the non­ living, and in the attribution of like qualities to things superficially resembling one another; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes active form in what may be generally termed magic. For example, the rite of baptism is explained when we connect it with barbaric lustrations and water-worship generally; as also that of the Eucharist by reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods; feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten. Middleton, him­ self a clergyman, shows perplexity when watching the elevation of the host at mass. He lacked that knowledge of the origin of sacramental rites which study of barbaric customs has since supplied. In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough, the “ central idea ” of which is “ the concep­ tion of the slain god,” he shows at what an early stage in his speculations man formulated the conception of deity in­ carnated in himself, or in plant or animal, and as afterwards slain, both the incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The god is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representative; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer : “By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn­ god, the corn is his proper body ; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood ■ and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a wine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament.” It is, perhaps, needless to point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching to Demeter, or to add what further parallels are suggested in the belief that Dionysus was slain, rose again, and descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. This, however, by the way. What has to be emphasised is, that in the quotation just given we have transubstantiation clearly anticipated as the barbaric idea of eating the god. In proof of the underlying continuity of that idea two witnesses—Catholic and Protestant—may be cited. The Church of Rome, and in this the Greek Church is at one therewith, thus defines the term transubstantiation in the Canon of the Council of Trent:— If any one shall say that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conver­ sion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining—which conversion the Catholic Church most fittingly calls Transubstantiation— let him be anathema. The Church of England, through the medium of a letter to a well-known newspaper, the British Weekly (29th August, 1895), supplies the following �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY illustration of the position of its “High” section, and this, it is interesting to note, from the church of which Mr. Gladstone’s son is rector, and in which the dis­ tinguished statesman himself often read the lessons :— A few Sundays ago—8 o’clock celebration of Holy Communion. Rector, officiating minister (Hawarden Church). When the point was reached for the communi­ cants to partake, cards containing a hymn to be sung after Communion were distributed among the congregation. This hymn opened with the following couplet:—• “ Jesu, mighty Saviour, Thou art in us now.” And my attention was arrested by an asterisk referring to a footnote. The word “in,” in the second line, was printed in italics, and the note intimated that those who had not communicated should sing “■with" instead of “in"—i.e., those who had taken the consecrated elements to sing “ Thou art in us now,” and those who had not, to sing “ Thou art with us now.” Whether, therefore, the cult be bar­ baric or civilised, we find theory and practice identical. The god is eaten so that the communicant thereby becomes a “partaker of the divine nature.” In the gestures denoting sacerdotal benediction we have probably an old form of averting the evil eye; in the breathing on a bishop at a service of consecration there was the survival of belief in trans­ ference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern spiritualist who describes appari­ tions as having the “consistency of cigar-smoke” is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost. The inhaling of the last breath of the dying Roman by his nearest kins­ man has parallel in the’ breathing of the risen Jesus on his disciples that they might receive the Holy Ghost (Johnxx. 22). In the offering of prayers for the dead; in the canonisation and intercession of saints ; in the prayers and offerings at the shrines of the Virgin and saints, and at the graves of martyrs; there are the 35 manifold forms of that great cult of the departed which is found throughout the world. To this may be linked the belief in angels, whether good or bad, or guardian, because the element common to the whole is animistic, the peopling of the heavens above, as well as the earth beneath, with an innumerable company of spiritual beings influencing the des­ tinies of men. Well might Jews and Moslems reproach the Christians, asj they did down to the eighth centuryp with having filled the world with morei gods than they had overthrown in the' pagan temples ; while we have Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriae, when reciting the names and functions of saints, adding that “ as many things as we wish so many gods have we made.” Closely related to this group of beliefs is the adoration of relics, the vitality of which has springs too deep in human nature to be wholly abolished, whether we carry about us a lock from the hair of some dead loved one, or read of the fragments of saints or martyrs which lie beneath every Catholic altar, or of the skull-bones of his ancestor which the savage carries about with him as a charm. Then there? is the long list of church festivals, the reference of which to pagan prototypes is but one step towards their ultimate explanation of nature-worship ; there are I the procession's which are the successors of Corybantic frenzies, and, more re­ motely, of savage dances and other! forms of excitation; there is that now somewhat casual belief in the Second Advent which is a member of the wide­ spread group wherein human hopes fix eyes on the return of long-sleeping heroes; of Arthur and Olger Dansk, of Vainamoinen and Quetzalcoatl, of Charle­ magne and Barbarossa, of the lost Marko of Servia and the lost King Sebastian. We speak of it as “casual,” because among the two hundred and eighty-odd sects scheduled in Whitaker1s Almanack the curious in such inquiries will note only three distinctive bodies of Adven­ tists. All changes in popular belief have been, �36 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION and practically remain, superficial; the old animism pervades the higher creeds. In our own island, for example, the Celtic and pre-Celtic paganism remained unleavened by the old- Roman religion. The legions took back to Rome the gods which they brought with them. The names of Mithra and Serapis occur on numerous tablets, the worship of the one —that “ Sol invictus ” whose birthday at the winter solstice became (see p. 25) the anniversary of the birth of Christ— had ranged as far west as South Wales and Northumberland; while the founda­ tions of a temple to the other have been unearthed at York. The chief Celtic gods, in virtue of common attributes as elemental nature-deities, were identified with certain dii majores of the Roman pantheon, and the dece matres equated with the gracious or malevolent spirits of the indigenous faith. But the old names were not displaced. Neither did the earlier Christian missionaries effect any organic change in popular beliefs, while, during the submergence of Christianity under waves of barbaric invasion, there were infused into the old religion kindred elements from oversea which gave it yet more vigorous life. The eagle penetra­ tion of Gibbon detected this persistent element at work when he describes the sequel to the futile efforts of Theodosius to extirpate paganism. The ancestor­ worship which lay at the core of much of it took shape among the Christianised pagans in the worship of martyrs and in the scramble after their relics. The bodies of prophets and apostles were discovered by the strangest coincidences, and transported to the churches by the Tiber and the Bosphorus ; and, although the supply of these more important remains were soon exhausted, there was no limit to the production of relics of their person or belongings, as of filings from the chains of S. Peter, and from the gridiron of S. Lawrence. TheYatacombs yielded any number of the bodies of martyrs, and Rome became a huge manufactory to meet the demands for wonder-working relics from every part of Christendom. A sceptical feeling might be aroused at the claims of a dozen abbeys to possession of the veritable crown of thorns wherewith the majesty of the suffering Christ was mocked, but it was silenced before the numerous fragments of his cross, since ingenuity has computed that this must have con­ tained at least one hundred and eighty million cubic millimetres, whereas the total cubic volume of all the known relics is but five millions. “ It must,” remarks Gibbon (Decline and Fall, end of chap, xxviii.), “ingeniously be con­ fessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the supersti­ tions of paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.” Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for which its apologists claim divine origin and gui­ dance “to the end of the world ” we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and superstition being deadly foes, the ex­ planation of that hostile attitude towards inquiry, and that dread of its results, which marked Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape from the narrow confines of Judaism, and to its fortunate contact with the enterprising peoples to whom the civilisation of Europe and the New World is due. �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY 37 2. From, Augustine to Lord Bacon A.D. 400-A.D. 600 The foregoing slight outline of the ments of Redi refute a doctrine which causes which operated for centuries had held part of the biological field for against the freedom of the human mind about two thousand years, and which will render it needless to follow the still has adherents. Of course Augus­ history of the development of Christian tine, as do modern Catholic biologists, polity and dogma—the temporalising of excepted man from the operation of the one, and the crystallising of the other. secondary causes, and held that his soul Yet one prominent actor in that history was created by the direct intervention of demands a brief notice, because of the the Creator. Augustine’s concessions influence which his teaching wielded from are, therefore, more seeming than real, the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The and, moreover, we find him denying the ftnnals of the churches in Africa, along existence of the antipodes on the ground whose northern shores Christianity had that Scripture is silent about them, and spread early and rapidly, yield notable also that, if God had placed any races names, but none so distinguished as that there, they could not see Christ descend­ of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 ing at his second coming. To Augustine to 430 a.d. This greatest of the Fathers the air was full of devils, who are the ©f the Church sought, as has been re­ cause of “all diseases of Christians.” marked already, to bring the system of In other words, he was not ahead of the Aristotle, the greatest of ancient natural­ illusions of his age. Then, too, he ists, into line with Christian theology. shows that allegorising spirit which was His range of study was well-nigh as wide manifest in Greece a thousand years as that of the famous Stagirite, but we earlier; the spirit which reads hidden are here concerned only with so much of meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in it as bears on an attempt to graft the Omar Khayyam; and which, in the development theory on the dogma of hands of present-day Gnostics, mostly special creation. Augustine, accepting fantastic or illiterate cabalists, converts the Old Testament cosmogony as a the plain narratives of Old and New revelation, believed that the world was Testaments into vehicles of mysterious created out of nothing; but, this initial types and esoteric symbols. It is in paradox accepted, he argued that God such allegorical vein that Augustine had endowed matter with certain powers explains the outside and inside pitching ©f self-development which left free the of the ark as typifying the safety of the Operation of natural causes in the pro­ Church from the leaking-in of heresy; duction of plants and animals. With while the ghastly application of sym­ this, however, as already noted, he held, bolical exegetics is seen in his citation of with preceding philosophers and with the words of Jesus, “Compel them to his fellow-theologians, the doctrine of come in,” as a divine warrant for the spontaneous generation. It explained to slaughter of heretics. We shall meet with no other such him the existence of apparently purpose­ less creatures, as flies, frogs, mice, etc. commanding figure in Church history 4< Certain very small animals,” he says, till nine hundred years have passed, ** may not have been created on the fifth when Thomas Aquinas, the “ Angel of and sixth days, but may have originated the Schools,” appears. But, although later from putrefying matter.” Not till that period marks no advance of the the seventeenth century did the experi- Church from her central position, it �3« PIONEERS OE EVOLUTION witnessed changes in her fortune through the intrusion of a strange people into her territory and sanctuaries. Perhaps there are few events in history more impressive than the conversion of the wild and ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century from stone-worship to monotheism. The series of conquests which followed had also, as an indirect and unforeseen result, effects of vast im­ portance in the revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris to the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does the inquiry fall within our present purpose, to discover the special impulses which led Mohammed, the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith whose one creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the unity of God. Large numbers of Jews and Christians had settled in Arabia long before his time, and he had become acquainted with the narrowness of the one, and with the causes of the wranglings of the other, riven, as these lastnamed were, into sects quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. These, and the fetichism of his fellowcountrymen, may, perhaps, have impelled him to start a crusade the mandate for which he, in fanatic impulse, believed came from heaven. The result is well known. The hitherto untamed nomads became the eager instruments of the prophet. Under his leadership, and that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag of Islam was carried from East to West, till within one hundred years of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca (622 a.d.) it waved from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. With the. con­ quest of Syria there was achieved one of the greatest and most momentous of triumphs in the capture'of Jerusalem, and the seizure of sites sanctified to Christians by association with the cruci­ fixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Only a few years before (614 a.d.) the holy city had been taken by Chosroes; the sacred buildings raised over the venerated tomb had been burned, and the cross—a spurious relic—carried off by the Persian king. These places have been, as it were, the cockpit of Christen­ dom from the time of the siege of Jerusalem under Titus to that of the Crimean War, when blood was spilt like water in a conflict stirred by squabbles between Latin and Greek Christians over possession of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre these sectaries are still kept from flying at one another’s throats by the muskets of Mohammedan soldiers. The Arabian conquest of Persia fol­ lowed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after the prophet’s death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through the propagandism of Christian­ ity among the Hellenised Jews, of whom, as of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years’ pause, the Saracens (Ar. sharkiin, orientals) resumed their conquer­ ing march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In “the fair and fertile isle of Andalusia” the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and north-western portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their indepen­ dence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their advance in Western �the arrest of inquiry Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. in 7x8, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Mohammedan conquest was first checked. Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast Alexandrian library. “A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may Contradict it,” and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the renaissance of knowledge was as wholly accidental as the story of it is in­ teresting. Under the Sassanian kings, Persia had become an active centre of intellectual life, reaching the climax of its Augustan age in the reign of Chosroes. Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at his court, and translations of the writings of the Indian sages completed the eclecticism of that enlightened monarch. Then came the ruthless Arab, and philosophy and science were eclipsed. But with the advent of the Abbaside Khalifs, who number the famous Haroun al-Raschid among them, there came revival of the widest tolera­ tion, and consequent return of intellec­ tual activity. Baghdad arose as the seat of Empire. Situated on the high road of Oriental commerce, along which travelled foreign ideas and foreign culture, that city became also the Oxford of her time. Arabic was the language of the conquerors, and into that poetic but unphilosophic tongue Greek philosophy and science were rendered. Under the rule of those Khalifs, says Renan, “nontolerant, non-reluctant persecutors,” free thought developed; the Motecallenim or “ disputants ” held debates, where all religions were examined in the light of reason. Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy were text-books in the colleges, the repute of whose teachers brought to Baghdad and Naishapur (dear to lovers of “old Khayyam ”) students westward from Spain, and eastward from Transoxiana. 39 “ Arab ” philosophy, therefore, is only a name. It has been well described as “a system of Greek thought expressed in a Semitic tongue; and modified by Oriental influences called into existence by the patronage of the more liberal princes, and kept alive by the zeal of a small band of thinkers.” In the main, it began and ended with the study of Aristotle, commentaries on whom became the chief work of scholars, at whose head stands the great name of Averroes. Through these—a handful of Jews and Moslems—knowledge of Greek science, of astronomy, algebra, chemistry, and medicine, was carried into Western Europe. By the latter half of the tenth century, one hundred and fifty years after the translation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become no mean riva of Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were founded; colleges to which the Girton girls of the period could repair to learn mathematics and history were set up by lady principals; manufactures and agri­ culture were encouraged; and lovely and stately palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova, Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the far-famed Alh^mra or Red Fortress still overlooks. Seven hundred years before there was a' public lamp in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy roadways bordered by windowless dwellings, Cordova had miles of well-lighted, well-paved streets; and the constant use of the bath by the “ infidel ” contrasted with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride of flesh-mortifying devotees and the out­ ward and odorous signs of their religion. The pages of our dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and chemical terms; in the names of the principal “fixed” stars; and in the words “adj miral ” and “ chemise ”; the influence of the “ Arab ” in science, war, and dress. It forms no part of our story to tell how feuds between rival dynasties and rival sects of Islam, becoming more acute as time went on, enabled Chris­ tianity to recover lost ground, and, in the capture of Granada in 1492, to put �40 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION an end to Moorish rule in Spain. Before that event, a knowledge of Greek philo­ sophy had been diffused through Chris­ tendom by the translation of the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and other scholars, into Latin. That was about the middle of the twelfth century, when Aristotle, who had been translated into Arabic some three centuries earlier, also appeared in Latin dress. The detachment of any branch of knowledge from theology being a thing undreamed-of, the deep reverence in which the Stagirite was held by his Arabian commentators ultimately led to his becoming “ suspect ” by the Christians, since that which approved itself to the followers of Mohammed must, ipso facto, be condemned by the followers of Jesus. Hence came re­ action, and recourse to the Scriptures as sole guide to secular as well as sacred knowledge; recourse to a method which, as Hallam says, “had not untied a single knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy.” So far as the scanty records tell (for we may never know how much was suppressed, or fell into oblivion, under ecclesiastical frowns and threats; nor how many thinkers toiled in secret and in dread), none seemed possessed either of courage or desire to supplement the revealed word by examination into things themselves. To supplant it was not dreamed-of. But in the middle of the thirteenth century one notable exception occurred in the person of Roger Bacon, sometimes called Friar Bacon in virtue of his belonging to the order of Fran­ ciscans. He was born in 1214 at Ilchester, in Somerset, whence he after­ wards removed to Oxford, and thence to Paris. That this remarkable and manysided man, classic and Arabic scholar, mathematician, and natural philosopher, has not more recognised place in the annals of science is strange, although it is, perhaps, _ partly explained by the fact that his writings were not reissued for more than three centuries after his death. He has been credited with a number of inventions, his title to which is however doubtful, although the doubt in nowise impairs the greatness of his name. He shared the current belief in alchemy, but made a number of experiments in chemistry pointing to his knowledge of the properties of the various gases, and of the components of gunpowder. If he did not invent spectacles, or the microscope and telescope, he was skilled in optics, and knew the principles on which those instruments are made, as the following extract from his Opus Majus shows : “We can place trans­ parent bodies in such a form and position between our eyes and other objects that the rays shall be refracted and bent towards any place we please, so that we shall see the object near at hand, or at a distance, under any angle we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters, and may number the smallest particles of sand, by reason of the greatness of the angle under which they appear.” He knew the “wisdom of the ancients” in the cataloguing of the stars, and suggested a reform of the calendar—following the then unknown poet-astronomer of Naishapur. But he believed in astrology, that bastard science which from remotest times had ruled the life of man, and which has no small number of votaries among ourselves to this day. Roger Bacon’s abiding title to fame rests, how­ ever, on his insistence on the necessity of experiment, and his enforcement of this precept by practice. As a mathe­ matician he laid stress on the application of this “first of all the sciences”; indeed, as “preceding all others, and as dis­ posing us to them.” His experiments, both from their nature and the seclusion in which they were made, laid him open to the charge of black magic—in other words, of being in league with the devil. This, in the hands of a theology thus “possessed,” became an instrument of awful torture to mankind. Roger Bacon’s denial of magic only aggravated his crime, since in ecclesiastical ears this was tantamount to a denial of the activity, nay more, of the very existence, �THE ARREST OF fHQV/RV of Satan. So, despite certain encourage­ ment in his scientific work from an old friend, who afterwards became Pope Clement IV., for whose information he wrote his Opus Majus, he was, on the death of that potentate, thrown into prison, whence tradition says he emerged, after ten years, only to die. The theories of mediaeval schoolmen —a monotonous record of unprogressive ideas—need not be scheduled here, the more so as we approach the period of discoveries momentous in their ultimate effect upon opinions which now possess . only the value attaching to the history of discredited conceptions of the universe. Commerce, more than scientific curiosity, gave the impetus to the discovery that the ®rth is a globe. Trade with the East was divided between Genoa and Venice. These cities were rivals, and the Genoese, alarmed at the growing success of the Venetians, resolved to try to reach India from the West. Their schemes were justified by reports of land indica­ tions brought by seamen who had passed through the “ Pillars of Hercules ” to the Atlantic. The sequel is well known. Columbus, after clerical opposition, and rebuffs from other states, “ offering,” as Mr. Payne says, in his excellent History of America, “ though he knew it not, the New World in exchange for three ships and provisions for twelve months,” finally secured the support of the Spanish king, and sailed from Cadiz on the 3rd August, 1492. On nth October he sighted the fringes of the New World, and, believing that he had sailed from Spain to India, gave the name West Indies to the islandgroup. America itself had been dis­ covered by roving Norsemen five hundred years before, but the fact was buried in Icelandic tradition. Following Colum­ bus, Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese, set sail in 1497, and, taking a southerly course, doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two years later, Ferdinand Magel­ lan started on a voyage more famous than that of Columbus, since his ambi­ tion was to sail round the world, and thus complete the chain of proof against 41 the theory of its flatness. For “though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth should be a widespread plain bordered by the waters, yet he comforted himself when he con­ sidered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner, is the substance.” Doubling Cape Horn through the straits that bear his name, Magellan entered the vast ocean whose calm surface caused him to call it the Pacific, and, after terrible sufferings, reached the Ladrone Islands, where, either at the hands of a mutinous crew or of savages, he was killed. His chief lieutenant, Sebastian d’Eleano, con­ tinued the voyage, and, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, brought the San Vittoria—name of happy omen—-to anchor at St. Lucar, near Seville, on 7th September, 1522. Brought, too, the story of a circumnavigated globe, and of new groups of stars never seen under northern skies. The scene shifts, for the time being, from the earth to the heavens. The Church had barely recovered from the blow struck at her authority on matter! of secular knowledge, when another is dealt, and that by an ecclesiastic, Co­ pernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, in Prussia. But before pursuing this, some reference to the revolt against the Church of Rome, which is the great event of the sixteenth century, is neces­ sary, if only to inquire whether the movement known as the Reformation justified its name as freeing the intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as were the areas which it covered and the effects which it wrought, its quarrel with the Church of Rome was not because of that Church’s attitude towards freedom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest of nobler minds against the corruptions fostered by the Papacy ; in England, it was personal and political in origin, securing popular support by its anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national irritation against foreign control. But, both here and �42 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION abroad, it sought mending rather than ending; “ not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic.” It disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole in­ terpreter of Scripture, and contended that such interpretation was the right and duty of the individual. But it would not admit the right of the indi­ vidual to call in question the authority of the Bible itself: to that book alone must a man go for knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual. So that the Reformation was but an exchange of fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bound the mind. “ Learning perished where Luther reigned,” said Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Reformer agreeing with his coadjutor, Melancthon, in permitting no tampering with the written Word. Copernicus not­ withstanding, they had no doubt that the earth was fixed, and that sun and stars travelled round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Com­ mentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions about the creation as narrated in that book would render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called them “ locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice.” Reason he denounced as the “ arch whore ” and the “devil’s bride”; Aristotle is a “prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and twice execrable.” Consistently enough, Luther believed vehemently in a personal devil, and in witches; “ I would myself burn them,” he says, “even as it is written in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders.” To him demoniacal possession was a fact clear as noonday : idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy, and all other mental and nervous disorders, were due to it. Hence, a movement whose intent appeared to be the freeing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical explanation of mental diseases and that curative treat­ ment of them which is one of the countless services of science to suffering mankind. To Luther, the descent of Christ into hell, which modern research has shown to be a variant of an Orphic legend of the underworld, was a real event, Jesus going thither that he might conquer Satan in a hand - to - hand struggle. Therefore, freedom of thought, as we define it, had the bitterest foe in Luther, although, in his condemnation of “works,” and his fanatical dogma of man’s “justification by faith alone,” which made him reject the Epistle of James as one “of straw,” and as un­ worthy of a place in the Canon, he unwittingly drove-in the thin end of the rationalist wedge. The Reformers had hedged the canonical books with theories of verbal inspiration which extended even to the punctuation of the sentences. They thus rendered intelligent study of the Bible impossible, and did grievous injury to a collection of writings of vast historical value, and of abiding interest as records of man’s primitive speculations and spiritual development. But Luther’s application of the right of private judg­ ment to the omission or addition of this or that book into a canon which had been closed by a Council of the Church, surrendered the whole position, since there was no telling where the thing might stop. Copernicus waited full thirty years before he ventured to make his theory public. The Ptolemaic system, which assumed a fixed earth with sun, moon, and stars revolving above it, had held the field for about fourteen hundred years. It accorded with Scripture; it was adopted by the Church; and, more­ over, it was confirmed by the senses, the correction of which still remains, and will long remain, a condition of intellec­ tual advance. Little wonder is it, then, that Copernicus hesitated to broach a theory thus supported, or that, when published, it was put forth in tentative form as a possible explanation more in accord with the phenomena. A preface, presumably by a friendly hand, com­ mended the Revolutions of the Heavenly �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY Bodies to Pope Paul III. It urged that “as in previous times others had been allowed the privilege of feigning what circles they chose in order to explain the "phenomena,” Copernicus “had con­ ceived that he might take the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth’s motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs.” A copy of the book was placed in the hands of its author only a few hours before his death on 23rd May, 1543This “upstart astrologer”; this “fool who wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy,” for “sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth ”—these are . Luther’s words — was, therefore, beyond the grip of the Holy Inquisi­ tion. But a substitute was forthcoming. Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, had added to certain heterodox beliefs the heresy of Copernicanism, which he publicly taught from Oxford to Venice. For these cumulative crimes he was imprisoned and, after two years, con­ demned to be put to death “ as merci­ fully as possible and without the shedding of his blood,” a Catholic euphemism for burning a man alive. The murder was committed in Rome on 17th February, 1600. The year 1543 marks an epoch in biology as in astronomy. As shown in the researches of Galen, an Alexandrian physician of the second century, there had been no difficulty in studying the structure of the lower animals, but, fortified both by tradition and by pre­ judice, the Church refused to permit dis­ section of the human body, and in the latter part of the thirteenth Century Boniface VIII. issued a Bull of the major excommunication against offenders. Prohibition, as usual, led to evasion, and Vesalius, Professor of Anatomy in Padua University, resorted to various devices to procure “subjects,” the bodies of criminals being easiest to obtain. The end justified the means, as he was able 43 to correct certain errors of Galen, and to give the quietus to the old legend, based upon the myth of the creation of Eve, that man has one rib less than woman. This was among the discoveries an­ nounced in his De Corporis Human! Fabrica, published when he was only twenty-eight years of age. The book fell under the ban of the Church because Vesalius gave no support to the belief in an indestructible bone, nucleus of the resurrection body, in man. The belief had, no doubt, near relation to that of the Jews in the os sacrum, and may remind us of Descartes’ fanciful loca-, tion of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the brain known as the conarium, or pineal gland. On some baseless charge of attempting the dissection of a living subject, the Inquisition haled Vesalius to prison, and would have put him to death “as mercifully as possible,” but for the intervention of King Charles V. of Spain, to whom Vesalius had been physician. Returning in October, 1564, from a pilgrimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his alleged offence, he was shipwrecked on the coast of Zante, and died of exhaustion. While the heretical character and ten­ dencies of discoveries in astronomy and anatomy awoke active opposition from the Church, the work of men of the type of Gesner, the eminent Swiss naturalist, and of Csesalpino, professor of botany at Padua, passed unquestioned. No dogma was endangered by the classification of plants and animals. But when a couple of generations after the death of Coper­ nicus had passed, the Inquisition found a second victim in the famous Galileo, who was born at Pisa in 1564. After spending some years in mechanical and mathematical pursuits, he began a series of observations in confirmation of the Copernican theory, of the truth of which he had been convinced in early life. With the aid of a rude telescope, made by his own hands, he discovered the satellites of Jupiter; the moon-like phases of Venus and Mars ; mountains and valleys in the moon; spots on the �44 PIONEERS OP EVOLUTION sun’s disk; and the countless stars which compose the luminous band known as the Milky Way. Nought occurred to disturb his observations till, in a work on the Solar Spots, he explained the movements of the earth and of the heavenly bodies according to Copernicus. On the appearance of that book the authorities contented themselves with a caution to the author. But action fol­ lowed his supplemental Dialogue on the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems. Through that convenient medium which the title implies, Galileo makes the defender of the Copernican theory an easy victor, and for this he was brought before the Inquisition in 1633. After a tedious trial, and threats of “rigorous personal examina­ tion,” a euphemism for “ torture,” he was, despite the plea—too specious to deceive —that he had merely put the pros and cons as between the rival theories, con­ demned to abjure all that he had taught. There is a story, probably fictitious, since it was first told in 1789, that when the old man rose from his knees he muttered his conviction that the earth moves, in the words “e pur si muove.” As a sample of the arguments used by the ecclesiastics when they substituted, as rare exception, the pen for the faggot, the reasoning advanced by one Sizzi against the existence of Jupiter’s moons may be cited : “ There are seven win­ dows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is ad­ mitted to the tabernacle of the body, viz.: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. So, in the heavens, as in a macrocosm, or great world, there are two favourable stars, Jupiter and Venus; two unpropitious, Mars and Saturn; two luminaries, the sun and moon, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From these and many other phenomena of nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye, and, therefore, can exercise no influence over the earth, and would, of ' 1 I I course, be useless ; and, therefore, do not exist.” In this brief summary of the attitude of the Church towards science it is not possible, and, if it were so, it is not needful, to refer in detail to the con­ tributions of the more speculative philo­ sophers, who, although they made no discoveries, advocated those methods of research and directions of inquiry which made the discoveries possible. Among these a prominent name is that of Lord Bacon, whose system of philosophy, known as the inductive, proceeds from the collection, examination, and com­ parison of any group of connected facts to the relation of them to some general principle. The universal is thus ex­ plained by the particular. But the in­ ductive method was no invention of Bacon’s ; wherever observation or testing of a thing preceded speculation about it, as with his greater namesake, there the Baconian system had its application. Lord Bacon, moreover, undervalued Greek science; he argued against the Copernican theory ; and either knew nothing of, or ignored, Harvey’s momen­ tous discovery of the circulation of the blood. A more illustrious name than his is that of René Descartes, a man who combined theory with observation ; “one who,” in Huxley’s words, “saw that the discoveries of Galileo meant that the remotest parts of the universe were governed by mechanical laws, while those of Harvey meant that the same laws presided over the operations of that portion of the world which is nearest to us—namely, our own bodily frame.” The greatness of this man, a good Catholic, whom the Jesuits charged with Atheism, has no mean tribute in his influence on an equally remarkable man, Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza reduced the Cartesian analysis of phenomena into God, mind and matter, to one phenomenon—namely, God, of whom matter and spirit, ex­ tension and thought, are but attributes. His short life fell within the longer span of Newton’s, whose strange sub­ jection to the theological influences of �THE ARREST OF INQUIRY his age is seen in this immortal inter­ preter of the laws of the universe wasting Bis later years on an attempt to interpret Unfulfilled prophecy. These and others, as Locke, Leibnitz, Herder, and Schel­ ling, like the great Hebrew leader, had glimpses of a goodly land which they were not themselves to enter. But, perhaps, in the roll of illustrious men to whom prevision came, none have better claim to everlasting remembrance than Immanuel Kant. For in his Theory of the Heavens, published in 1755, he anticipates that hypothesis of the origin of the present universe which, associated with the succeeding names of Laplace and Herschel, has, under corrections furnished by modern physics, common acceptance among us. Then, as shown in the following extract, Kant foresees the theory of the development of life from formless stuff to the highest types : “ It is desirable to examine the great domain of organised beings by means of a methodical comparative anatomy, in order to discover whether we may not find in them something resembling a system, and that too in connection with their mode of generation, so that we may not be compelled to stop short with a mere consideration of forms as they are —which gives no insight into their gene­ ration—and need not despair of gaining a full insight into this department of Nature. The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common plan of structure, which seems to be visible not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the other parts—so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening or length­ ening of some parts, and by the sup­ pression and development of others, might be able to produce an immense variety of species—gives us a ray of hope, though feeble, that here perhaps some results may be obtained, by the application of the principle of the mecha­ nism of Nature; without which, in fact, Ho science can exist. This analogy of forms (in so far as they seem to have been produced in accordance with a 45 common prototype, notwithstanding their great variety) strengthens the supposition that they have an actual blood-relationship, due to derivation from a common parent; a supposition which is arrived at by observation of the graduated approxima­ tion of one class of animals to another, beginning with the one in which the principle of purposiveness seems to be most conspicuous—namely, man, and extending down to the polyps, and from these even down to mosses and lichens, and arriving finally at raw matter, the lowest stage of Nature observable by us. From this raw matter and its forces, the whole apparatus of Nature seems to have been derived according to mechanical laws (such as those which resulted in the production of crystals); yet this apparatus, as seen in organic beings, is so incomprehensible to us that we feel ourselves compelled to conceive for it a different principle. But it would seem that the archgeologist of Nature is at liberty to regard the great Family of creatures (for as a Family we must conceive it, if the above-mentioned con­ tinuous and connected relationship has a real foundation) as having sprung from the immediate results of her earliest revolutions, judging from all the laws of their mechanisms known to or con­ jectured by him.” In our arrival at the age of these seers, we feel the play of a freer, purer air; a lull in the miasmatic currents that bring intolerance on their wings. The tole­ rance that approaches is due to no surrender of its main position by dog­ matic theology, but to that larger percep­ tion of the variety and complexity of life, ignorance of, or wilful blindness to, which, is the secret of the survival of rigid opinion. The demonstration of the earth’s roundness ; the discovery of America; the growing conception of inter-relation between the lowest and the highest life-forms ; the slow but sure acceptance of the Corpernican theory; and, above all, the idea of a Cosmos, an unbroken order, to which every advance in knowledge contributes, justified and �46 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION fostered the free play of the intellect. Hume certainly did not overrate the Foreign as yet, however, to the minds force of the blow which he dealt at of widest breadth, was the conception of supernaturalism, one of a series of the inclusion of Man himself in the uni­ attacks which, in France and Britain, versal order. Duality—nature over­ carried the war into the camp of the ruled by supernature—-was the un­ enemy, and changed its tactics from altered note ; the supernature as part of aggressive to defensive. But none the nature a thing undreamed-of. Nor less is it true that the “superstitious could it be otherwise while the belief in delusions ” against which he planted his diabolical agencies still held the field, logical artillery were killed neither by sending wretched victims to the stake on ! argument nor by evidence. Delusion the evidence of conscientious witnesses, and error do not perish by controversial and with the concurrence of humane warfare. They perish under the slow judges. Animism, the root of all per­ and silent operation of changes to which sonification, whether of good or evil, they are unable to adapt themselves. had lost none of its essential character, The atmosphere is altered: the organ­ and but little of its vigour. ism can neither respond nor respire; “ I flatter myself,” says Hume, in the therefore, it dies. Thus, save where opening words of the essay upon “ Mira­ lurks the ignorance which is its breath cles,” in his Inquiry Concerning Human of life, has wholly perished belief in Understanding, li that I have discovered witchcraft; thus, too, is slowly perishing an argument of a like nature (he is refer­ belief in miracles, and, with this, belief ring to Archbishop Tillotson’s argument in the miraculous events, the incarna­ on Transubstantiation) which, if just, tion, resurrection, and ascension of will, with the wise and learned, be an Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets everlasting check to all kind of super­ of Christianity are based, and in which stitious delusion, and, consequently, will lies so largely the secret of its long hos­ be useful as long as the world endures.” ! tility 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, Navi; gation, Staticks, Magnetics, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments; with the state of these studies, and their culti­ vation at home and abroad.” Regardless I of South and such as agreed with him, I Torricelli worked at hydrodynamics, and I discovered the principle of the barometer; I Boyle inquired into the law of the com1 pressibility of gases; Malpighi examined I minute life-forms and the structure of I organs under the microscope; Ray and I Willughby classified plants and animals ; j Newton theorised on the nature of light, | and Roemer measured its speed; Halley 1 estimated the sun’s distance, predicted I the return of comets, and observed the I transits of Venus and Mercury; Hunter ■ dissected specimens, and laid the foundaI tions of the science of comparative | anatomy; and many another illustrious I worker contributed to the world’s stock ■ of knowledge “without let or hindrance,” I for in all this “ matters of theology were j precluded.” I I | I ! | | I i 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 in­ organic universe the earth was the last to become the 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 “came 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 �48 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION land and sea areas. But we are on surer ground when we meet the geo­ grapher 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 remem­ ber 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 some­ what diminished in size. But that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil re­ mains of aquatic and other animals on many mountains” 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 onwards, 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 Penta­ teuch. 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 rational­ istic interpretation of the appearance of the star of Bethlehem, and of the dark­ ness 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 mate­ rials in his compilation of the earlier parts of the Pentateuch. But, practically, the five books in­ cluded 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, Arch­ bishop Usher made his famous calcula­ tion 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 23rd 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 interpre­ tation of the great Fathers of the Church, “ declared, as the result of pro­ �THE RENASCENCE ON SCIENCE 49 found and exhaustive study of the Scrip­ published his recantation: “I declare tures, that ‘ heaven and earth, centre that I had no intention to contradict the and circumference, and clouds full of text of Scripture ; that I believe most water, were created all together, in the firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and same instant.’ ” The story of the Deluge was held to matter of fact. I abandon everything furnish sufficing explanation of the in my book respecting the formation of organic remains yielded by the rocks; the earth, and generally all which may but, failing this, a multitude of fantastic be contrary to the narrative of Moses.” theories were at hand to explain the That was in the year 1751. If the English theologians could not fossils. They were said to be due to a “ formative quality ” in the soil; to its deliver heretics of the type of Buffon to “ plastic virtue ”; to a “ lapidific juice ”; the secular arm, they used all the means to the “ fermentation of fatty matter ” ; ■that denunciation supplied for delivering to “the influence of the heavenly bodies,” them over to Satan. Epithets were or, as the late eminent naturalist, Philip hurled at them ; arguments drawn from Gosse, seriously suggested in his whimsi­ a world accursed of God levelled at cal book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie them. Saint Jerome, living in the fourth the Geological Knot, they were but century, had pointed to the cracked and simulacra wherewith a mocking Deity crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger; rebuked the curiosity of man. Every now Wesley and others saw in “ sin the explanation, save the right and obvious moral cause of earthquakes, whatever one, had its defenders, because it was their natural cause might be,” since essential to support some theory to rebut before Adam’s transgression no convul­ the evidence supplied by remains of sions or eruptions ruffled the calm of animals as to the existence of death in Paradise. Meanwhile, the probing of the world before the fall of Adam. the earth’s crust went on; revealing, Otherwise, the statements in the Old amidst all the seeming confusion of Testament, on which the Pauline reason­ distorted and metamorphosed rocks, an ing rested, were baseless, and to discredit unvarying sequence of strata, and of the these was to undermine the authority fossils embedded in them. Different of the Scriptures from Genesis to the causes were assigned for the vast changes Apocalypse. No wonder, therefore, ranging over vast periods ; one school that theology was up in arms, or that it believing in the action of volcanic and saw in geology a deadlier foe than astro­ such-like catastrophic agents ; another in nomy had seemed to be in ages past. the action of aqueous agents, seeing, The Sorbonne, or Faculty of Theology, more consistently, in present operations in Paris, burnt the books of the geologists, the explanation of the causes of past banished their authors, and, in the case changes. But there was no diversity of of Buffon, the famous naturalist, con­ opinion concerning the extension of the demned him to retract the awful heresy, earth’s time-history and life-history to which was declared “contrary to the millions on millions of years. creed of the Church,” contained in these So, when this was to be no longer words: “ The waters of the sea have resisted, theologians sought some basis produced the mountains and valleys of of compromise on such non-fundamental the land; the waters of the heavens, points as the six days of creation. It reducing all to a level, will at last deliver was suggested that perhaps these did not the whole land over to the sea, and the mean the seventh part of a week, but Sea, successively prevailing over the land, periods, or aeons, or something equally will leave dry new continents like those , elastic ; and that, if the Mosaic narrative which we inhabit.” So’ the old man was regarded as a poetic revelation of repeated the submission of Galileo, and the general succession of phenomena, E �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION beginning with the development of order pression at variance with the facts re­ out of chaos, and ending with the creation vealed by science ”; all efforts at recon­ of man, Scripture would be found to ciliation being only “ different modes of have anticipated or revealed what science obliterating the characteristic features of confirms. It was impossible, so theo­ Genesis, and of reading into it a view logians argued, that there could be aught which it does not express.” else than harmony between the divine While the ground in favour of the works and the writings which were literal interpretation of Genesis was assumed to be of divine origin. Science being contested, an invading force, that could not contradict revelation, and what­ had been gathering strength with the years, ever seemed contradictory was due to was advancing in the shape of the science misapprehension either of the natural of Biology. The workers therein fall fact or to misreading of the written into two classes : the one, represented by word. But although the story of the Linnaeus and his school, applied them­ creation might be clothed, as so exalted selves to the classifying and naming of and moving a theme warranted, in poetic plants and animals; the other, repre­ form, that of the fall of Adam and of sented by Cuvier and his school, examined the drowning of his descendants, eight into structure and function. Anatomy persons excepted, must be taken in all made clear the machinery; physiology its appalling literalness. Confirmation the work which it did, and the conditions of the Deluge story was found in the under which the work was done. Then, fossil shells on high mountain tops; through comparison of corresponding while as for the giants of antediluvian organs and their functions in various times, there were the huge bones in life-forms, came growing perception of proof. Some of these relics of mastodon their unity. But only to a few came and mammoth were actually hung up in gleams of that unity as proof of common churches as evidence that “ there were descent of plant and animal, for, save in giants in those days ” ! Geoffroy Saint- scattered hints of inter-relation between Hilaire tells of one Henrion, who pub­ species, which occur from the time of lished a book in 1718, giving the height Lord Bacon onwards, the theory of their of Adam as one hundred and twenty- immutability was dominant until forty three feet nine inches, and of Eve as years ago. Four men form the chief vanguard one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches, Noah being of rather less stature. of the biological movement. “ Modern But to parley with science is fatal to classificatory method and nomenclature theology. Moreover, arguments which have largely grown out of the work of involve the cause they support in ridicule Linnaeus; the modern conception of may be left to refute themselves. And biology as a science, and of its relation while theology was hesitating, as in the to climatology, geography, and geology, amusing example supplied by Dr. William are as largely rooted in the labours of Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible (published Buffon; comparative anatomy and palae­ in 1863), wherein the reader, turning ontology owe a vast debt to Cuvier’s up the article “ Deluge,” is referred results; while invertebrate zoology and to “Flood,” and thence to “Noah”; the revival of the idea of Evolution are archaeology produced the Chaldean intimately dependent on the results of original of the legend whence the story the work of Lamarck. In other words, of the flood is derived. With candour the main results of biology up to the as commendable as it is rare, the Rever­ early years of this century are to be end Professor Driver, from whom quota­ found in, or spring out of, the works of tion has been made already, admits that, these men.” Linnaeus, son of a Lutheran pastor, “read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates an im­ born at Roeshult, in Sweden, in 1707, �TNE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE 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 con­ structive, 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 im­ press 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 Linnseus, 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 hefelt 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 HO service to it. Nature is far from sub­ jecting herself to final causes in the 51 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 dis­ favours of Nature, by food, by the pro­ longed 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, conse­ quently, 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 Elton, 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 specula­ tions 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 con-, elusions 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 �52 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION 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 appa­ rent 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 doc­ trine of “let lions be, and there were lions.” His shrewd comment on the preformation notion of development has been quoted (pp. 16, 17). The substance of his argument in support of a “physical basis of life ” is as follows : “ When we revolve in our minds the metamorphoses 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 ob­ serve 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 pain 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. And, on this, Erasmus Darwin further remarks : “ As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable pro­ ductions long before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long before other families 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 ih 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 specu­ lations, 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 mono­ graph 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 percep­ tion, 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 sub­ ject excited much attention ”; rendering “the eminent service of arousing atten­ tion to the probability of all change in the organic as well as in the inorganic w’orld 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 �THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE clerk, in which occupation he secured leisure for his favourite pursuit of natural history. Through Buffon’s influence he procured a civil appointment, and ulti­ mately 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 anni­ hilations of prior plants and animals. Although orthodox by conviction, his researches told against his tenets, because his important work in the recon­ struction of skeletons of long extinct animals laid the foundation of palaeon­ tology. 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 Aris­ totelian mechanical figure of life as a ladder, with its detached steps, he sub­ stituted 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 de­ pend on mechanical, physical, and chemical causes which are inherent in the nature of matter itself.” He believed 53 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 follow­ ing 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 deter­ mined 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 con­ tinually 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 them­ selves 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 dis­ appear, although they were originally part of the plan of organisation in these animals.” The discovery of an efficient cause of modifications, which Lamarck �54 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION refers to the efforts of the creatures them­ selves, has placed his speculations in the museum of biological curiosities; but sharp controversy rages to-day over the question raised in Lamarck’s fourth pro­ position—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 under­ graduate at Cambridge, Lyell published his Principles of Geology, a work destined to assist in paving the way for the re­ moval 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, how­ ever, 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 Hugh Miller was, “ a theo­ logian studying geology.” Following the theories of uniformity of action laid down by Hutton, by Buffon, and by that in­ dustrious 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 demon­ strated in detail that the formations 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 i 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, how­ ever, 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 fer­ tilisation of plants. Following his re­ searches, 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 “poison­ ing 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 �of sctkiwf Almighty both to advance them from the several grades and modify their structure as circumstances required.” Although now referred to only as “ mark­ ing time ” in the history of the theory of Evolution, the book created a sensa­ tion 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 pre­ paring the ground for the reception of analogous views.” Three years after the Festiges, although none then knew it, or, knowing the fact, would have admitted it, there was 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 Abbe­ ville, 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 paradisaical state on that memorable “23 October, 4004 b.c.,” when, according to Dr. Light­ foot’s reckoning (see p. 48), 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 Conserva­ tion of Energy, makes clear the inde­ structibility of both matter and motion. Then, to complete the work of prepara­ tion effected by the discoveries here briefly outlined, there appeared, in a defunct newspaper, the Leader, in its issue of 20th March, 1852, an article by Herbert Spencer on the “ Development Hypothesis,” in which the following Striking passage occurs: “ Those who If 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, vege­ table 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 origina­ tion of species by the process of modifi­ cation 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 modi­ fication has effected, and is effecting,.] decided changes in all organisms subject; to modifying influences....... They can I show that in successive generations these I 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 ini dogs, greater than those on which dis­ tinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show, too, that the 1 changes daily taking place in ourselves— ij the facility that attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases — the strengthening of �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION 5û 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 geo­ logical 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. Name. 8oo-a.d. 1800. Place and Date of Birth. Died. Geber (Djafer) Avicenna (Ibu Sina) Mesopotamia, 830 Bokhara, 980 1037 Averroes (Ibu Roshd) Spain, 1126 1198 Roger Bacon Christopher Columbus Vasco de Gama Ilchester, 1214 Genoa, 1445 Sines, 1469 (Portugal) 1292 1306 1525 i Ferdinand Magellan Nicholas Copernicus Ville de Sabroza, 1470 Thorn, 1473 (Prussia) I Ç2I 1543 Andreas Vesalius ■ Conrad Gesner Andrew Caesalpino Tycho Brahe 1564 1565 1603 l60I Giordano Bruno Brussels, 1514 Zurich, 1516 Arezzo, 1519 (Tuscany) Knudstrup, 1546 (Sweden) Nola, 1550 Francis, Lord Bacon London, 1561 1626 Galileo Galilei Johann Kepler Pisa, 1564 Wiirtemburg, 1571 1642 1630 William Harvey Folkestone, 1578 1657 Thomas Hobbes Malmesbury, 1578 i679 1 16OO Speciality. Earliest known Chemist Expositor of Aristotle ; Physician and Geologist Translator and Commentator of Aristotle First English Experimentalist Discoverer of America, 1492 Sailed round the South of Africa, 1 .1497 Circumnavigator of the Globe, 1519 Discoverer of the Sun as the Centre of our System Human Anatomy Classification of Plants and Animals Comparative Botanist Collector of Astronomical Data Expounder of the Copernican System, and Philosopher Expounder of the Inductive Philo- ; sophy Numerous Astronomical Discoveries Discoverer of the Three Laws of ’ Planetary Movements Discovered the Circulation of the Blood One of the Founders of Modern Ethics �THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE Leading Men Name. of 57 Science—Continued. Place and Date of Birth. Died. Speciality. René Descartes La Haye, 1596 (Touraine) 1650 Benedict Spinoza Amsterdam, 1632 1677 John Locke Wrington, 1632 (Somerset) Leipsic, 1646 1704 Resolution of all Phenomena in terms of Matter and Motion (Dual- • ism) Resolution of all Phenomena in terms of Substance — God (Mo­ nism) Moral Philosopher ! 1716 Philosopher and Mathematician 1727 Expounder of the Law of Gravitation Astronomer Psychology of Man Systematic Botany and Zoology Count de Buffon Woolsthorpe, 1642 (Lincoln) London, 1656 Illingworth, 1705 Roeshult, 1707 (Sweden) Burgundy, 1707 David Hume Edinburgh, 1711 1776 Immanuel Kant James Hutton Erasmus Darwin Kdnigsburg, 1724 Edinburgh, 1726 Elton, 1731 (Lincolnshire) Bezantin, 1744 1804 1797 1802 Hanover, 1738 Beaumont en-Ange, 1749 Pomerania, 1766 Eaglesfield, 1767 (Cumberland) Montbéliard, 1769 Etampes, 1772 Berlin, 1769 1822 1827 J 833 1844 Churchill, 1769 (Oxon) 1840 Boucher de Perthes Rèthel, 1788 1868 Sir William Hooker Sir Charles Lyell Norwich, 1785 Kinnordy, 1797 (Forfarshire) Esthonia, 1792 1865 1875 Lancaster, 1804 Germany, 1805 Neuss, 1810 (Prussia) Potsdam, 1821 1892 1872 1882 1894 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Sir Isaac Newton Edmund Halley David Hartley Carl von Linnaeus Jean Baptiste Lamarck Sir William Herschel Marquis de Laplace Conrad Sprengel John Dalton Baron Cuvier Geoff. St. Hilaire Alexander von Humboldt William Smith Ernst von Baer Sir Richard Owen Hugo von Mohl Theodor Schwann Hermann von Helmholtz 1741 1757 1778 1788 1829 1832 1844 1859 1876 Contributions from Biology and i Geology towards Theory of Evo­ lution Philosophy of the Anti-Supernatural, converging in Man Formulator of the Nebular Theory Geologist : Uniformitarian {See Buffon) Biologist : Contributions against Theory of Fixity of Species Astronomer Expounder of the Nebular Theory Botanist P'ormulator of the Modern Atomic Theory Palaeontologist and Anatomist Zoologist Explorer Geologist ; mapped Strata of Great Britain Discoverer of Evidences of Man’s Antiquity Botanist Geologist ; developed Hutton’s Theory Embryologist ; Law of Organic Development Palaeontologist Discoverer of Protoplasm Founder of the Cell Theory Formulator of the Doctrine of the Conservation of Energy �PART IV MODERN EVOLUTION i. Darwin and Wallace . “We have to deal with Man as a product of Evolution ; with Society as a product of Evolu­ tion ; and with Moral Phenomena as products of Evolution.”—Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, § 193. Charles Robert Darwin (the second 1873 by his distinguished cousin, Francis name was rarely used by him) was born Galton, he says : “I consider that all I at Shrewsbury on the 12 th February, have learnt of any value has been self1809. He came of a long line of Lincoln­ taught ”; and he adds that his education shire yeomen, whose forbears spelt the ■ fostered no methods of observation or name variously, as Darwen, Derwent, and reasoning. Of the Shrewsbury Grammar Darwynne, perhaps deriving it from the School, where, after the death of his river of kindred name. His father was mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, a kindly, prosperous doctor, of sufficient the celebrated potter), in his ninth year, scientific reputation to secure his election he was placed as a border till his six­ into the Royal Society, although that teenth year, he tells us, in the modest coveted honour was then more easily and candid “ Autobiography ” printed in obtained than now. Of the more the Life and Letters, “nothing could famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, have been worse for the development of the reminder suffices that both his prose my mind.” All that he was taught were and poetry were vehicles of suggestive the classics, and a little ancient geo­ speculations on the development of life­ graphy and history; no mathematics, forms. Dealing with bald facts and and no modern languages. Happily, he dates for clearance of what follows, it had inherited a taste for natural history may be added that Charles Darwin was and for collecting, his spoils including educated at the Grammar School of his not only shells and plants, but also coins native town; that he passed thence to and seals. When the fact that he helped Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities; | his brother in chemical experiments be­ was occupied as volunteer naturalist on came known to Dr. Butler, the headboard the Beagle from December, 1831, . master, that desiccated pedagogue pub­ till October, 1836; that he published his licly rebuked him “ for wasting time on epoch-making Origin of Species in Novem­ ■ such useless subjects.” Then his father, ber, 1859; and that he was buried by I angry at finding that he was doing no the side of Sir Isaac Newton in West­ good at school, reproved him for caring minster Abbey on the 26th April, 1882. for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat­ As with not a few other men of “ light catching, and declared that he would be and leading,” neither school nor univer­ a disgrace to the family ! He sent him sity did much for him, nor did his boy­ to Edinburgh University with his brother hood give indication of future greatness. to study medicine, but Darwin found the In his answers to the series of questions dulness of the lectures intolerable, and addressed to various scientific men in the sight of blood sickened him, as it �modernevolution did his father. Although the effect of the u incredibly ” dry lectures on geology made him—the future Secretary of the Geological Society !—vow never to read a book on the science, or in any way study it, his interest in biological subjects grew, and its firstfruits were shown in a paper read before-the Plinian Society at Edin­ burgh in 1826, in which he reported his discovery that the so-called ova of Flustra, or the sea-mat, were larvae. But his father had to accept the fact that Darwin disliked the idea of being a doctor, and, fearing that he would de­ generate into an idle sporting-man, pro­ posed that he should become a clergy­ man ! Darwin says upon this I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard or thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England, though other­ wise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity; and, as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman. Nor was this intention and my father’s wish ever formally given up, but died a natural death when, on leaving Cambridge, I joined the Beagle as naturalist. If the phreno­ logists are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a clergyman. A few years ago the secretaries of a German psychological society asked me earnestly by letter for a photograph of myself; and some time afterwards I received the proceedings of one of the meetings, in which it seemed that the shape of my head had been the subject of a public discussion, and one of the speakers declared that I had the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests. The result was that early in 1828 Darwin went to Cambridge, the three years spent at which were “ time wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned.” His passion for shooting and hunting led him into a sporting, card-playing, drinking company, but science was his redemption. No pursuit gave him so much pleasure as collecting beetles, of his zeal in which the following is an example : “ One day, on tearing off gome old bark, I saw two rare beetles, 59 and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and a new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas ! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.” Happily for his future career, and therefore for the interests of science, Darwin became intimate with men like Whewell, Henslow, and Sedgwick, while the reading of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, and of Sir John Herschel’s Introduction to Natural Philosophy, stirred up in him “ a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” The vow. to eschew geology was quickly broken when he came under the spell of Sedgwick’s influence, but it was the friendship of Henslow that determined his after career, and prevented him from becoming the “Rev. Charles Darwin.” For on his return from a geological tour in Wales with Sedgwick he found a letter from Henslow awaiting him, the purport of which is in the following extract:— “ I have been asked by Peacock (Lowndean Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge) to recommend him a naturalist as companion to Captain Fitz­ Roy, employed by Government to survey the southern extremity of America. I have stated that I consider you to be the best-qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation.” In connection with this the following memorandum from Darwin’s pocket-book of 1831 is of interest:—-“Returned to Shrewsbury at end of August. Refused offer of voyage.” This refusal was given at the instance of his father, who objected to the scheme as “ wild and unsettling, and as disreput­ able to his character as a clergyman ” ; but he soon yielded on the advice of his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, and on Darwin’s plea that he “ should be deuced clever to spend more than his allowance whilst on board the Beagle! On this his father answered with a smile, “ Bpt �6o PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION they tell me you are very clever.” It is amusing to find that Darwin narrowly escaped being rejected by Fitz-Roy, who, as a disciple of Lavater, doubted whether a man with such a nose as Darwin’s “ could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” The details of that voyage, the first of the two memorable events in Darwin’s otherwise unadventurous life, are set down in delightful narrative in his Naturalist's Voyage Round the World, and it will suffice to quote a passage from the autobiography bearing on the significance of the materials collected during his five years’ absence During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the continent; and. thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each island of the group, none of the islands appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually became modified; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that “none of the evolutionary theories then current in the scientific world ” could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life...... I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be explained it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified...... In October, 1838—that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry—I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and, being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from longcontinued observations of the habits of plants and animals, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Shortly after his return he settled in London, prepared his journal and manu­ scripts of observations for publication, and opened, he says, under date of July, 1837, “my first note-book for facts in relation to the origin of species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” He acted for two years as one of the honorary secretaries of the Geo­ logical Society, which brought him into close relations with Lyell; and, as his health then allowed him to go into society, he saw a good deal of prominent literary and scientific contemporaries. In the autumn of 1842, two years and eight months after his marriage with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who died in October, 1896, Darwin removed from London, the air and social demands of which were alike unsuited to his health, and finally fixed upon a house in the secluded village of Down, near Beckenham, where he spent the rest of his days. Henceforth the life of Darwin is merged in the books in which, from time to time, he gave the result of his long years of patient observation and inquiry, from the epoch-making Origin to the monograph on earthworms. With bad health, apparently due to gouty tendencies aggravated by chronic sea­ sickness during his voyage ; with nights that never gave unbroken sleep, and days that were never passed without prostrating pain; he might well have felt justified in doing nothing whatever. But he was saved from the accursed monotony of a wealthy invalid’s life by his insatiate delight in searching for that solution of the problem of the mutability of species which time would not fail to bring. In this, he tells us, he forgot his “ daily discomfort,” and thus was delivered from morbid introspection. Darwin worked at his rough- notes on the variation of animals and plants under domestication, adding facts collected by “ printed inquiries, by conversations with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading,” gleams of light coming till he says that he is “ almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” But he was still groping in the dark as to the application of selection to wild plants and animals, until, as remarked above, the chance �MODERN EVOLUTION reading of Malthus suggested a working theory. A brief sketch of this theory, written out in pencil in 1842, was elaborated in 1844 into an essay of two hundred and thirty pages. The im­ portance attached to this was shown in a letter which Darwin then addressed to his wife, charging her, in the event of his death, to apply ^400 to the expense of publication. He also named certain competent men from whom an editor might be chosen, preference being given to Sir Charles (then Mr.) Lyell, at whose advice Darwin began to write out his views on a scale three or four times as extensive as that in which they appeared in the Origin of Species. Their publication in an abstract form was hastened by the receipt, in June, 1858, of a paper, containing “ exactly the same theory,” from Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace at Ternate in the Moluccas. This refer­ ence to that distinguished explorer will, before the story of the coincident dis­ covery is further told, fitly introduce a sketch of his career. Alfred Russel Wallace was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the 8th January, 1823. He was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in his fourteenth year began the study of land­ surveying and architecture under an elder brother. Quick-witted and obser­ ving, he studied a great deal more on his own account in his journeyings over England and Wales, the results of which abide in the wide range of subjects— Scientific, political, and social—engaging his active pen from early manhood to the present day. About 1844 he exchanged the theo­ dolite for the ferule, and became Eng­ lish master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, in which town he found a congenial friend in the person of his future fellow-traveller, Henry Walter Bates. Bates was then employed in his father’s hosiery warehouse, from which he escaped, as often as the long working hours then prevailing allowed, into the fields with his collecting-box. Both Schoolmaster and shopman were ardent 61 naturalists, Mr. Wallace, as he tells us, being at that time “chiefly interested in botany,” but he afterwards took up his friend’s favourite pursuit of entomology. The writer, when preparing his memoir of Bates (which prefaces a reprint of the first edition of the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons'), learned from Mr. Wallace that in early life he did not keep letters from Bates and other corre­ spondents. But, fortunately, among Bates’s papers there was a bundle of in­ teresting letters from Wallace written between June, 1845, and October, 1847, from Neath, in South Wales, to which town he had removed. In one of these, dated the 9th November, 1845, Wallace asks Bates if he had read the Vestiges of the Natural History of Crea­ tion, and a subsequent letter indicates that Bates had not formed a favourable opinion of the book. A later letter is interesting as conveying an estimate of Darwin. “ I first,” Wallace says, “ read Darwin’s Journal three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt’s Personal Narrative ; as a work of general interest, perhaps superior to it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell’s views. Elis style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour, affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought.” But of still greater moment is a letter in which Wallace tells Bates that he begins “ to feel dissatisfied with a mere local collection. I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” The two friends had often discussed schemes for going abroad to explore some virgin region, nor could their scanty means prevent the fulfilment of a scheme which has en­ riched both science and the literature of travel. The choice of country to explore was settled by Wallace’s perusal of a little book entitled A Voyage up the River Amazons, including a Residence in Pard, by W. H. Edwards, an American �Ó2 PIONEERS OE EVOLUTION tourist, published in Murray’s “ Family Library” in 1847. In the autumn of that year Wallace proposed a joint expe­ dition to the River Amazons for the purpose of exploring the Natural History of its banks ; the plan being to make a collection of objects, dispose of the duplicates in London to pay expenses, and gather facts, as Mr. Wallace ex­ pressed it in one of his letters, “ towards solving the problem of the origin of species.” The choice was a happy one, for, except by the German zoologist von Spix, and the botanist von Martius in 1817-20, and subsequently by Count de Castelnau, no exploration of a region so rich and interesting to the biologist had been attempted. Early in 1848 Bates and Wallace met in London to study South American animals and plants in the principal collections, and afterwards went to Chatsworth to gain information about orchids, which they proposed to collect in the moist tropical forests and send home. On 26th April, 1848, they embarked at Liverpool in a bargue of only 192 tons burthen, one of the few ships then trading to Para, to which seaport of the Amazons region a swift passage, “ straight as an arrow,” brought them on 28th May. The travellers soon settled in a rocinha, or country-house, a mile and a-half from Para, and close to the forest, which came down to their doors. Like other towns along the Amazons, Para stands on ground cleared from the forest that stretches, a well-nigh pathless jungle of luxuriant primeval vegetation, two thou­ sand miles inland. In that paradise of the naturalist the collectors gathered consignments which met with ready sale in London, and thus spent a couple of years in pursuits moderately remunerative and wholly pleasurable, till, on reaching Barra, at the mouth of the Rio Négro, one thousand miles from Para, in March, 1850, Bates and Wallace, who was accompanied by his younger brother, parted company, “finding it more con­ venient to explore separate districts and collect independently.” Wallace took the northern parts and tributaries of the Amazons, and Bates kept to the main stream, which, from the direction it seems to take at the fork of the Rio Negro, is called the Upper Amazons or the Solimoens. Different in character and climatic conditions from the Lower Amazons, it flows through a “ vast plain about a thousand miles in length, and five hundred or six hundred miles in breadth, covered with one uniform, lofty, impervious, and humid forest.” Bates stayed in the country till June, 1859, but Wallace left in 1852, and in the following year published an account of his journey under the title of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. That book was written under the serious disadvantage of the destruction of the greater part of the notes and specimens by the burning of the ship in which Mr. Wallace took pas­ sage on his homeward voyage. That it remains one of the select company of works of travel for which demand is con­ tinuous is evidenced in a reprint which appeared in 1891. If it affords few hints of the author’s bent of mind towards the question of the origin of species, it shows what interest was being aroused within him over the allied subject of the geo­ graphical distribution of plants and animals which Mr. Wallace was to make so markedly his own. In 1854 he sailed for the Malay Archi­ pelago, where nearly eight years were spent in exploring the region from Sumatra to New Guinea. The large and varied outcome of that labour was embodied in numerous papers com­ municated to learned societies and scientific journals, and in a series of delightful books from The Malay Archi­ pelago> first published in 1869, to Island Life, published in 1880. Among the minor results of his extensive travels—for all else that Wallace did pales before the great discovery which links his name with Darwin’s—was the establishment of a line, known as “ Wallace’s,” which divides the Malay Archipelago into two �MODERN E VOL UTION 63 main groups, “ Indo-Malaysia and Austro- to Mr. Darwin,” asking him, if he thought Malaysia, marked by distinct species and well of the essay, to send it to Lyell. groups of animals.” That line runs This Darwin did with the following through a deep channel separating the remarks : “ Your words have come true islands of Bali and Lombok; the plants with a vengeance—that I should be fore­ and animals on which, although but stalled........ I never saw a more striking fifteen miles of water separate them, coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. differ from each other even more than do sketch written out in 1742, he could not the islands of Great Britain and Japan. have made a better short abstract! f‘A similar line, but somewhat farther Even his terms now stand as heads of east, divides on the whole the Malay my chapters. Please return me the MS., which he does not say he wishes me to from the Papuan races of man.” Among the more fugitive contributions publish; but I shall, of course, at once which mark Mr. Wallace’s approach to write and offer to send to any journal. a solution of the problem in quest of So all my originality, whatever it may which he and Bates went to the Amazons amount to, will be smashed, though my is a paper, On the Law which has Regu­ book, if it will ever have any value, will lated the Introduction of New Species, not be deteriorated, as all the labour published in the Annals and Magazine consists in the application of the theory.” of Natural History, 1855. In this he j Darwin came out well in this business. shows that some form of evolution of For to have hit upon a theory which one species from another is needed to interprets so large a question as the explain the geological and geographical origin and causes of modification of life­ forms; to keep on turning it over and facts of which examples are given. In the interesting preface to the reprint over again in the mind for twenty long of the famous paper On the Tendencies years ; to spend the working hours of of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from every day in collection and verification the Original Type, Mr. Wallace recites of facts for and against it; and then to the several researches which he made in have another man launching a “ bolt quest of that “ form ” till, when lying ill from the blue ” in the shape of a paper with fever at Ternate, in February, 1858, with exactly the same theory, might well Something led him to think of the disturb even a philosopher of Darwin’s “ positive checks ” described by Malthus serenity. However, both Hooker and Lyell had in his Essay on Population, a book which he had read some years before. read his sketch a dozen years before, and Oddly enough, therefore, the honours lie it was arranged by them, not as con­ with the maligned Haileybury Reverend sidering claims of priority, which have Professor of Political Economy in fur­ too often been occasion of unworthy nishing both Darwin and Wallace with wrangling, but in the “ interests of science the clue. The “ positive checks ”—war, generally,” that an abstract of Darwin’s disease, famine—Wallace felt must act manuscript should be read with Wallace’s even more effectively on the lower paper at a meeting of the Linnean animals than on man, because of their Society on the 1st July, 1858. The full more rapid rate of multiplication. And title of the joint communication was, he tells us, in the prefatory note to a On the Tendencies of Species to Form Varieties, and on the Perpetuation of reprint of his paper, “there suddenly Varieties and Species by Natural Selec­ flashed on me the idea of the survival of the fittest, and in the two hours that tion. Sir Joseph Hooker, describing the elapsed before my ague fit was over I gathering, says that “ the interest excited had thought out the whole of the theory, was intense, but the subject was too and in the two succeeding evenings wrote novel and too ominous for the old school it out in full and sent it by the next post to enter the lists before armouring.” �64 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath. Lyell’s approval, and, perhaps, in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors and their theme.” Nothing can deprive Mr. Wallace of the honour due to him as the co-originator of the theory, which, regarded in its appli­ cation to the origin, history, and destiny of man, involves the most momentous changes in belief, and there may be fitly quoted here his own modest, and doubt­ less correct, assessment of limitations which in no wise invalidate his high claims. In the Preface to his Contribu­ tions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870) Mr. Wallace says the book will prove that he both saw at the time the value and scope of the law which he had discovered, and has since been able to apply to some purpose in a few original lines of investigation. “ But,” he adds, “ here my claims cease. I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the Origin of Species. I have long since measured my own strength, and know full well that it would be quite unequal to that task. Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring patience in accumulating, and that won­ derful skill in using, large masses of facts of the most varied kind—that wide and accurate physiological knowledge— that acuteness in devising and skill in carrying out experiments, and that ad­ mirable style of composition at once clear, persuasive, and judicial—qualities which, in their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as the man, per­ haps of all men now living, best fitted for the great work he has undertaken and accomplished.” In a letter to Wallace dated 20th April, 1870, Darwin says: “There has never been passed on me, or, indeed, on any one, a higher eulogium than yours. I wish that I fully deserved it. Your modesty and candour are very far from new to me. I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe I can say this of my­ self with truth, and I am absolutely sure it is true of you.” But on one question, and that round which discussion still rages, the friends were poles asunder. There had been correspondence between them as to the bearing of the theory of natural selection on man, and in April, 1869, Darwin wrote: “As you expected, I differ grievously from you, and I am very sorry for it. I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to man.” In the fifteenth chapter of his comprehensive book on Darwinism, Wallace admits the action of natural selection in man’s physical structure. This structure classes him among the vertebrates; the mode of human suckling classes him among the mammals; his blood, his muscles, and his nerves, the structure of his heart with its veins and arteries, his lungs and his whole respiratory and circulatory systems, all closely correspond to those of other mammals, and are often almost identical with them. He possesses the samenumber of limbs, terminating in the same number of digits, as belong funda­ mentally to the mammals. His senses are identical with theirs, and his organs of sense are the same in number and occupy the same relative position. Every detail of structure which is common to the Mammalia as a class is found also in man, while he differs from them only in such ways and degrees as the various species or groups of mammals differ from each other. He is, like them, begotten by sexual conjugation; like them, de­ veloped from a fertilised egg, and in his embryonic condition passes through stages recapitulating the variety of enor­ mously remote ancestors of whom he is �MODERN EVOLUTION the perfected descendant. Full-grown, he appears as most nearly allied to the anthropoid or man-like apes; so much does his skeleton resemble theirs that, comparing him with the chimpanzee, we find, with very few exceptions, bone for bone, differing only in size, arrangement, and proportion. Mr. Wallace, therefore, rejected the idea of man’s special creation “ as being entirely unsupported by facts, as well as in the highest degree improbable.” But he would not allow that natural selection explains the origin of man's spiritual and intellectual nature. These, he argues, “ must have had another origin, and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit.” More detailed treatment of this argu­ ment will be given further on; here reference is made to it as furnishing the explanation why Mr. Wallace kept not his “ first estate,” and dropped out of the ranks of Pioneers of Evolution. Many subjects, as hinted above, have occupied his facile pen—land nationali­ sation, causes of depression in trade, labourers’ allotments, vaccination, et hoc genus omne; showing, at least, the pro­ minence which all social matters occupy in the minds of the leading exponents of the theory of Evolution. For of this, as will be seen, both Herbert Spencer and Huxley supply cogent examples in their application of that theory to human interests. But it is as a defender, although on lines of his own not wholly orthodox, of supernaturalism, with atten­ dant beliefs in miracles and the grosser forms of spiritualism, that Mr. Wallace appears in the character of opponent to the inclusion of man’s physical nature as a product of Evolution. The arresting influence of these views, when backed by honest, sincere, and eminent men of the type of Mr. Wallace, and when also supported by several prominent men of science, renders it desirable to show that modern psychism is but savage animism “ writ large,” and wholly explicable on the theory of con­ tinuity. In his book on Miracles and 65 Modern Spiritualism, of which a revised edition, with chapters on Apparitions and Phantasms, was issued in 1895, Mr. Wallace contends that “ Spiritualism, if true, furnishes such proofs of the exist­ ence of ethereal beings, and of their power to act upon matter, as must revo­ lutionise philosophy. It demonstrates the actuality of forms of matter and modes of being before inconceivable; it demonstrates mind without brain, and intelligence disconnected from what we know as the material body; and it thus cuts away all presumption against our continued existence after the physical body is disorganised and dissolved. Yet more, it demonstrates, as completely as the fact can be demonstrated, that the so-called dead are still alive; that our friends are still with us, though unseen, and guide and strengthen us when, owing to absence of proper conditions, they cannot make their presence known. It thus furnishes a proof of a future life, which so many crave, and for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt, so many in positive disbelief. It substitutes a definite, real, and practical conviction for a vague, theoretical, and unsatisfying faith. It furnishes actual knowledge on a matter of vital importance to all men, and as to which the wisest men and most advanced thinkers have held, and still hold, that no knowledge was attainable.” This claim, this tremendous claim, on behalf of the phenomena of spirit­ ualism to supply an answer to “ the question of questions : the ascertainment of man’s relation to the universe of things; whence our race has come; to what goal we are tending,” rests on the assumption with which Mr. Wallace starts—“Spiritualism, if true." The essay from which the above pas­ sages are quoted is preceded by re­ ferences in detail to a considerable number of cases of “ the appearance of preterhuman or spiritual beings,” the evidence of which “ is as good and definite as it is possible for any evidence of any fact to be.” These ghost stories �66 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION contrasted with the full-flavoured eerie tales of old, are feebly monotonous. The apparatus of the medium is limited ; the phenomena are largely of the “ horse­ play ” order. Through the whole series we vainly seek for some ennobling and exalting conception of a life beyond, some glimpses “behind the veil,” only to find that the shades are but diluted or vulgarised parodies of ourselves; or that “ the filthy are filthy still,” like the departed bargee whose “ communicating intelligence” (we quote from a recent book on spiritualism entitled The Great Secret} was as coarse-mouthed as when in the flesh. In considering, if it be deemed worth while, the evidence of genuineness of the occurrences, we are thrown, not on the honesty, but on the competency, of the witnesses. The most eminent among these show themselves persons of undisciplined emotions. The distinguished physicist, Professor Oliver Lodge, who has been described to the writer by an intimate friend of the Pro­ fessor as “ longing to believe some­ thing,” argues that in dealing with psychical phenomena a hazy, muzzy state of mind is better than a mind “ keenly awake ” and “ on the spot ” (see “ Address ” to the Society for Psy­ chical Research, Proceedings, part xxvi., pp. 14, 15). With this may be com­ pared a Mohammedan receipt for sum­ moning spirits given in Klunzinger’s Upper Egypt (p. 386) : “ Fast seven days in a lonely place, and take incense with you. Read a chapter 1,001 times from the Koran. That is the secret, and you will see indescribable wonders; drums will be beaten beside you, and flags hoisted over your head, and you will see spirits.” Thus have the dreamy Oriental Moslem and the self-hypnotised Western professor met together to elicit truth from trance. Concerning the competence of Mr. Wallace himself to weigh, unbiassed, the evidence which comes before him, it suffices to cite the case of Eusapia Paladino, a Neapolitan “ medium,” who, in the words of one of her most ardent dupes, became the “ unexpected instru­ ment of driving conviction as to the reality of psychical manifestations by the invisible into the minds of many scientists.” A number of distinguished savants testified to the genuineness of the woman’s performances in Professor Richet’s cottage on the He Roubant in the autumn of 1893. It was the serious and complete conviction of all of them (Lodge, Richet, Ochorowicz, and others) that “ on no single occasion during the occurrence of an event recorded by them was a hand of Eusapia’s free to execute any trick whatever.” Mr. Maskelyne, such testimony notwithstanding, declared that the whole business was “ the sorriest of trickeries,” and, to the credit of the Society for Psychical Research, it under­ took the expense of bringing Eusapia to England for the purpose of testing the genuineness of her doings. She was taken to a house in Cambridge, and detected as a vulgar impostor. Yet Mr. Wallace, in the new edition of his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, des­ cribes all the phenomena occurring at Professor Richet’s house as “ not ex­ plicable as the result of any known physical causes,” and, in a subsequent explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle of 24th January, 1896, expresses the opinion that “the Cambridge experi­ ments, so far as they are recorded, only prove that Eusapia might have deceived, not that she actually and consciously did so.” The integrity of Mr. Wallace is not to be doubted, but what becomes of his competence to judge when prejudice blinds itself to facts? Spiritualism, if true, demonstrates this and that about the unseen; but spiritualism, proved to be untrue, lacks half the dexterity of an astute conjurer, and the whole of his honesty. Every scientific man recognises the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy as a fundamental canon. But with those who regard the phenomena of spiritualism as “ not explicable ” except by supernatural causes, it would seem that that doctrine, as also the not unimportant conditions.of Time and �MODERN EVOLUTION Space, count for nothing. When we read their reports of the behaviour of mediums who project (of course, in the dark) “abnormal temporary prolonga­ tions ” like pseudopodia, we should feel alike depressed and confounded were there not abundant proofs what wholly un­ trustworthy observers scientific specialists can be outside their own domain. As the writer has remarked elsewhere, minds of this type must be built in watertight compartments. They show how, even in the higher culture, the force of a dominant idea may suspend or narcotise the reason and judgment, and con­ tribute to the rise and spread of another of the epidemic delusions of which history supplies warning examples. They also show that man’s senses have been his arch-deceivers, and his preconceptions their abettors, through­ out human history; that advance has been possible only as he has escaped through the discipline of the intellect from the illusive impressions about phe­ nomena which the senses convey. Upon this matter the words of the late Dr. Carpenter may be quoted, words the more weighty because they are the utterance of a man whose philosophy was influenced by deep religious con­ victions : “ With every disposition to accept facts when I could once clearly satisfy myself that they were facts, I have had to come to the conclusion that, whenever I have been permitted to employ such tests as I should employ in any scientific investigation, there was either intentional deception on the part of interested persons, or else self-decep­ tion on the part of persons who were Very sober-minded and rational upon all ordinary affairs of life.” He adds further : “It has been my business lately to inquire into the mental condition of some of the individuals who have re­ ported the most remarkable occurrences. I cannot—-it would not be fair—say all I Could with regard to that mental con­ dition ; but I can only say this, that.it all fits in perfectly well with the result of my previous studies upon the subject— 67 viz., that there is nothing too strange to be believed by those who have once surrendered their judgment to the extent of accepting as credible things which common sense tells us are entirely in­ credible.” The fact abides that the great mass of supernatural beliefs which have persisted from the lower culture till now, and which are still held by an overwhelming majority of civilised mankind, are re­ ferable to causes concomitant with man’s mental development; causes operative throughout his history. The low intel­ lectual environment of his barbaric past was constant for thousands of years, and his adaptation thereto was complete. The intrusion of the scientific method in its application to man disturbed that equilibrium. But this, as yet, only super­ ficially. Like the foraminifera that per­ sist in the ocean depths, the great majority of mankind have remained but slightly, if at all, modified; thus illus­ trating the truth of the doctrine of evo­ lution in their psychical history. (For that doctrine does not imply all-round, continuous advance. “ Let us never for­ get,” Mr. Spencer says in Social Statics* “ that the law is—adaptation to circum­ stances, be they what they may.”) There­ fore the superstitions that still dominate the life of man, even in so-called civi­ lised centres, are no stumbling-blocks to us. They are supports along the path of inquiry, because we account for their persistence. Thought and feeling have a common base, because man is a unit, not a duality. But the exercise of the one has been active from the beginnings of his history—indeed we know not at what point backwards we can classify it as human or quasi-human—while the other, speaking comparatively, has but recently been called into play. So far as its influence on the modern world goes, may we not say that it began at least in the domain of scientific naturalism with the Ionian philosophers ? Emotionally, we are hundreds of thousands of years old ; rationally, we are embryos. In other words, man wondered count­ �68 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION less ages before he reasoned ; because ledge, sufficing causes of abnormal feeling travels along the line of least re­ mental phenomena are found in abnor­ sistance, while thought, or the challenge mal working of the mental apparatus. by inquiry—-therefore- the assumption The investigation of hallucinations (Lat. that there may be two sides to a question alucinor, to wander in mind) leaves no —must pursue a path obstructed by the doubt that they are the effect of a morbid dominance of custom, the force of imita­ condition of that intricate, delicately tion, and the strength of prejudice and poised structure, the nervous system, fear. It is here that anthropology, nota­ under which objects are seen and sensa­ bly that psychical branch of it compre­ tions felt when no corresponding im­ hended under folk-lore, takes up the cue pression has been made through the from the momentous doctrine of here­ medium of the senses. When the dity ; explains the persistence of the nervous system is out of gear, voices, primitive ; and the causes of man’s tardy whether divine or of the dead, may be escape from the illusions of the senses, heard ; and actual figures may be seen. and the general conservatism of human A mental image becomes a visual image; nature. “ Born into life ! in vain, an imagined pain a real pain, as the Opinions, those or these, unalter’d to great physiologist, John Hunter, testified retain the obstinate mind decrees,” as in when he said : “I am confident that I the striking illustration cited in Heine’s can fix my attention to .any part until I Travel-Pictures. “ A few years ago have a sensation in that part.” Shake­ Bullock dug up an ancient stone idol in speare portrays the like condition when Mexico, and the next day he found that Macbeth attempts to clutch the dagger it had been crowned during the night wherewith to stab Duncan : with flowers. And yet the Spaniard had “ There’s no such thing ; exterminated the old Mexican religion It is the bloody business which informs with fire and sword, and for three Thus to mine eyes.” centuries had been engaged in ploughing This abnormal state, which sees things and harrowing their minds and im­ planting the seed of Christianity.” The having no existence outside the “ mind’s causes of error and delusion, and of the eye,” is no respecter of persons; the spiritual nightmares of olden time, being savage and the civilised are alike its made clear, there is begotten a generous victims. It may be organic or functional. sympathy with that which empirical Organic, when disease is present; func­ notions of human nature attributed to tional, through excessive fatigue, lack of wilfulness or to man’s fall from a high food or sleep, or derangement of the estate. Superstitions which are the out­ - digestive system, causing the patient, as Hood says, “ to think he’s pious when come of ignorance can only awaken pity. Where the corrective of knowledge is he’s only bilious.” Under such con­ absent, we see that it could not be ditions, hallucinations of all sorts otherwise. Where that corrective is possess the mind; hallucinations from present, but either perverted or not which the true peptic, who, as Carlyle exercised, pity is supplanted by blame. says, “ has no system,” is delivered. In either case, we learn that the art of Only the mentally anaemic, the emo­ life largely consists in that control of the tionally overwrought, the unbalanced, emotions and that diversion of them and the epileptic are the victims, into wholesome channels which the in­ whether of the lofty illusions of august tellect, braced with the latest know­ visions such as carried Saint Paul, Saint Theresa, and Joan of Arc into the ledge, can alone effect. Therefore, discarding theories of reve­ presence of the holiest; or hallucina­ lation, spiritual illumination, and other tion of drowned cat, thin and “ dripping assumed supramundane sources of know­ with water,” born of the disordered �MODËRN EVOLUTION 69 nerves of Mrs. Gordon Jones. To ! is the initiative and incentive of inquiry, quote iron Dr. Gower’s Bowman of enterprise, and of noble ideals; un­ Lecture {Nature, 4th July, 1895) on restricted, leads the dreamer and the “ Subjective Visual Sensations,” such as enthusiast into engulfing quicksands of Hence the accompany fits, when, e.g, sensations of illusions and delusions. sight occur without the retina being necessity of curbing a faculty so that, in unison with reason, it works towards stimulated :—definite ends within the domain, marking - The spectra perceived before epileptic fits vary man’s limits of service. As Dr. Maudsley widely. They may be stars or sparks, spherical luminous bodies or mere flashes of light, white reminds us in his sane and sober book or coloured, still or in movement. Often they on Natural Causes and Supernatural are more elaborate, distinct visions of faces, Seeming, “ not by standing out of nature persons, objects, places. They may be com­ in the ecstasy of a rapt and over-strained bined with sensations from the other special senses, as with hearing and smell. In one case idealism of any sort, but by large and close a warning, constant for years, began with thump­ and faithful converse with nature and ing in the chest ascending to the head, where it human nature in all their moods, aspects, became a beating sound. Then two lights and relations, is the solid basis of fruitful appeared, advancing nearer with a pulsating motion. Suddenly these disappeared and were ideals and the soundest mental develop­ replaced by the figure of an old woman in a red ment laid. The endeavour to stimulate cloak, always the same, who offered the patient and strain any mental function to an something that had the smell of Tonquin beans, activity beyond the reach and need of a and then he lost consciousness. Such warnings may be called psychovisual sensations. The physical correlate in external nature, and psychical element may be very strong, as in one to give it an independent value, is cer­ woman whose fits were preceded by a sudden tainly an endeavour to go directly con­ distinct vision of London in ruins, the river trary to the sober and salutary method Thames emptied to receive the rubbish, and she the only survivor of the inhabitants. by which solid human development has Had a man of lesser renown and taken place in the past, and is taking mental calibre than Mr. Wallace thrown place in the present.” the weight of his testimony into the The story of Darwin’s work must now scales in favour of spiritualism, there would have been neither necessity nor be resumed. Shortly after the Linnean excuse for this digression. But both meeting he prepared a series of chapters these pleas prevail when we find the co- which, always regarded by him as an formulator of the Darwinian theory “ Abstract,” ultimately took book form, among mediums and their dupes. The and was published, under the title of The Origin of Species, on the 24th Novem­ respectful attention which his words command ; the tremendous claims which ber, 1859. The story of the reception of the work he makes on behalf of the phenomena at séances as proving the existence of is admirably told by Huxley in the soul apart from body after death, and as chapter which he contributed to Darwin’s revealing the conditions under which it Life and Letters, and it may be com­ lives, have made incumbent the fore­ mended as useful reading to a generation going attempt to indicate what other which, drinking-in Darwinism from its birth, will not readily understand how explanation is given of those phenomena, showing how these fall in with all we such storm and outcry as rent the air, know of man’s tendencies to imperfect both in scientific as well as clerical observation and self-deception, and with quarters, could have been raised. “ In all that history tells of the persistence of fact,” says Huxley, “the contrast between the present condition of public opinion animistic ideas. A salutary lesson on the use and mis­ upon the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin’s views use of the imagination is thus taught. That which, under wholesome restraint, are now held in the scientific world; �7o PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION between the acquiescence, or at least quiescence, of the theologian of the selfrespecting order at the present day, and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-59, when the new theory re­ specting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for documentary evidence, I should be some­ times inclined to think my memories dreams.” The like reflection arises when we consider the indifference with which books of the most daring and revolu­ tionary character, both in theology and morals, are treated nowadays, in contrast to the uproar which greeted such a bruturn fulmen as Essays and Reviews. As for Colenso’s Pentateuch, and books of its type, orthodoxy has long taken them to its bosom. So far as the larger number of natural­ ists, and of the intelligent public who followed their lead, were concerned, there was an absolutely open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been, as the foregoing sections of this book have shown, a long time of preparation and speculation. We certainly find the keynote of Evolution in Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after his time Herbert Spencer, above all men, had removed it from the empirical stage, and placed it on a base broad as the facts which supported it. But it needed the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life, and touch man in his various interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done in application of the theory of development to social questions and institutions could avail much till Darwin’s theory gave it practical shape. Dissertations on the passage of the “homogeneous to the heterogeneous”; explanations of the theory of the evolu­ tion of complex sidereal systems out of diffused vapours of seemingly simple texture, interested people only in a vague and wondering fashion. But when Darwin illustrated the theory of the modification of life-forms by familiar examples gathered from his own experi­ ments and observations, and from inter­ course with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to men’s “ business and bosoms,” and if the vulgar interpreted Darwinism, as some, who should know better, interpret it even now, as explaining man’s descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to swim­ ming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the mystery of origins or of causes of variations, but the mystery of the ceaselessly-acting agent which, operating on favourable variations, has brought about myriads of species from simple forms. As Huxley reminds us in the passage quoted above, the attitude of the clergy towards the theory of Evolution has undergone an astounding change. Dr. Whewell remarked that every great dis­ covery in science has had to pass through three stages. First, people said, “It is absurd”; then they said, “It is contrary to the Bible”; finally, they said, “We always knew that it was so.” Thus it has been with Evolution. It is calmly discussed; even claimed as a “ defender of the faith,” at Church Congresses now­ adays. It was not so in the sixties. Here and there a single voice was raised in qualified sympathy—Canon Tristram and Charles Kingsley showed more than this —but both in the Old and the New World the “ drum ecclesiastic ” was beaten. Car­ dinal Manning declared Darwinism to be a “ brutal philosophy—to wit, there is no. God, and the ape is our Adam.” Pro­ testant and Catholic agreed in condemn­ ing it as “ an attempt to dethrone God ”; as “a huge imposture,” as “tending to produce disbelief of the Bible,” and “ to do away with all idea of God,” as “turn­ ing the Creator out of doors.” Such are fair samples to be culled from the anthology of invective which was the staple content of nearly every “criticism.” Occasionally some parody of reasoning appears when the “argument” is advanced that there is “a simpler explanation of the presence of these strange forms among the works of God in the fall of Adam”; but even this pseudo-concession to logic is rare, and one divine bad no �MODERN EVOLUTION hesitation in predicting the fate of Darwin and his followers in the world to come. “ If,” said a Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review, 11 the develop­ ment theory of the origin of man shall, in a little while, take the place—as doubtless it will—with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical conse­ quences will, in the life to come, have their portion with those who in this life ‘ know not God and obey not the Gospel of His Son.’” But the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, in the Quarterly Review of July, i860. “It is,” said Huxley, in his review of Haeckel’s Evolution of Man, “ a production which should be bound in good stout calf, or better, asses’ skin, by the curious book­ collector, together with Brougham’s attack on the undulatory theory of light when it was first propounded by Young.” The Bishop declared “the principle of natural selection to be absolutely incom­ patible with the word of God,” and as “ contradicting the revealed relations of creation to its Creator.” If by “ revealed relations ” and the “ word of God ” the Bible is intended, the evolutionist is in agreement with the bishop. But at this time of day it seems scarcely worth while to shake the dust off articles which have gone the way of all purely controversial matter, and justification for reference to them lies only in the fact that the contest between the biologists and the bishops is not yet ended. In contrast to all this, and in evidence of the compromise by which theology is vainly striving to justify itself, are these vague sentences from Archdeacon Wilson’s address at the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1896 : “ It is scarcely too much to say that the Theistic Evolutionist cannot be other­ wise than a practical Trinitarian, and cannot find a difficulty in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.” “Christian doctrine, apart from the state­ ment of historical facts, is the attempt to create out of Christ’s teaching a 71 philosophy of life which shall satisfy these needs (?>., the needs of humanity), and it will therefore remain the same in substance. But the form in which that doctrine will be presented must change with man’s intellectual environment. The bearing of Evolution on Christian doctrine is, therefore, in a word, to modify, not the doctrine, but the form in which it is expressed.” Postponing the story of the famous debate between Wilberforce and Huxley, the reception accorded to the Origin of Species by Darwin’s scientific contempo­ raries may be noted. Herbert Spencer’s position, as will be shown later on, was already distinctive: he was an Evolutionist before Darwin. Hooker, Huxley—who said that he was prepared to go to the stake, if needs be, in support of some parts of the book—Bates, and Lubbock were immediate converts; so were Asa Gray and Lyell, but with reservations, for Lyell, whose creed was Unitarian, never wholly accepted the inclusion of man, “body, soul, and spirit,” as the outcome of natural selection. Henslow and Pictet went one mile, but refused to go twain; Agassiz, Murray, and Harvey would have none of the new heresy; neither would Adam Sedgwick, who wrote a long protest to Darwin, couched in loving terms, and ending with the hope that “ we shall meet in heaven.” The attitude of Owen, if apparently neutral or tentative in open conversation, was, as an anonymous critic, deadly hostile. Although it is not included in the list of his writings given in the Life by his grandson, he is known to have been the author of the critique on the Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April, i860, and to have inspired the article contributed by Bishop Wilberforce to the Quarterly Review. At the outset of the Edinburgh article he speaks of Darwin’s “seduction” of “several, perhaps the majority of our younger naturalists ” by the homoeopathic form of the transmutation of species pre­ sented to them under the phrase of natural selection........ “Owen has long stated his �72 PIONEERS OF E VOL UTION belief that some pre-ordained law or secondary cause is operative in bringing about the change....... we therefore re­ gard the painstaking and minute com­ parison by Cuvier of the osteological and every other character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile with those of species living in his time ; and the equally philosophical investiga­ tion of the polyps operating at an interval of thirty thousand years in the buildingup of coral reefs by the profound palaeontologist of Neuchâtel [Agassiz is here referred to], as of far truer value in reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin of species than the speculations of Démailler, Buffon, Lamarck, ‘ Vestiges,’ Baden Powell, or Darwin ” (p. 532). Entangled in the meshes of this theory of a “ pre-ordained law,” which seems to bear some, relation to Aristotle’s “ per­ fecting principle,” and is in close alliance with the teaching of the great Cuvier, at whose feet Owen had sat, he remained to the end of his life a type of arrested development. While the Church cited him as an authority against the Darwinian theory, especially in its application to man’s descent, there remained in the memory of his brother savants his lack of candour in never withdrawing the statement made by him, and demon­ strated by Huxley as untrue, that the “hippocampus minor” in the human brain is absent from the brain of the ape. As for the reception of the book abroad, the French savants were some­ what coy, but the Germans, with Haeckel at their head, were enthusiastic. Darwin had, like all prophets, more honour in other countries than in his own, Evolu­ tion being rechristened Darwinismes. Translation after translation of the Origin followed apace, and the personal interest that gathered round the central idea led to the perusal of the book by people who had never before opened a scientific treatise. Punch seized on it as subject of caricature ; and writers of light verse found welcome material for “chaff” which the winds of oblivion have blown away, a stanza here and there surviving, as in Mr. Courthope’s Aristophanic lines:— Eggs weie laid as before, but each time more and more varieties struggled and bred, 1 ill one end of the scale dropped its ancestor’s tail, and the other got rid of his head. r rom ]]]e bilfi in brief words, were developed the Birds, unless our tame pigeons and ducks he; From the tail and hind legs, in the second-laid eggs> the apes—and Professor Huxley ! Heeding neither squib, satire, nor sermon, Darwin, in the quiet of his Kentish home, went on rearranging old materials, collecting new materials, and verifying both, the outcome of this being his works on the Fertilisation of Orchids and the Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, published in 1862 and 1867 respectively. Between these dates Huxley’s Man's Place in Nature-— logical supplement to the Origin of Species —appeared. But of this more anon. Meanwhile, as already named, Mr. Patrick Matthew had in the Gardener's Chronicle of 7th April, i860, drawn attention to an appendix to his book on Naval Timber and Arboriculture pub­ lished in 1831, in which he anticipated Darwin and Wallace’s theory as follows : “ The self-regulating adaptive disposi­ tion of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature,, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better-suited-to-circumstance in­ dividuals who are able to struggle for­ ward. to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occu­ pancy than any other kind; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prema­ turely destroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, �MODERN EVOLUTION n or defence from inclemencies or vicissi­ the central idea of the Origin: “How tudes of climate, whose figure is best ac­ extremely stupid not to have thought commodated to health, strength, defence, of that!” Twelve years elapsed before and support; whose capacities and in­ Darwin followed up his world-shaking stincts can best regulate the physical book with the Descent of Man. But the energies to self-advantage according to ground had been prepared for its recep­ circumstances—in such immense waste tion in the decade between i860 and 1870. Quoting Grant Allen’s able of primary and youthful life those only come to maturity from the strict ordeal summary of the advance of the theory by which Nature tests their adaptation to of Evolution in his Charles Darwin: her standard of perfection and fitness to “ One by one the few scientific men who continue their kind by reproduction ” still held out were overborne by the weight of evidence. Geology kept (PP- 384, 385)While speaking of difficulty in under­ supplying fresh instances of transitional standing some passages in Mr. Matthew’s forms; the progress of research in un­ appendix, Darwin says that “the full explored countries kept adding to our force of the principle of natural selec­ knowledge of existing intermediate species tion ” is there, and, in referring to it in a and varieties. During those ten years letter to Lyell, he adds that “ one may be Herbert Spencer published his First excused in not having discovered the Principles, his Biology, and the remodelled fact in a work on Naval Timber !” form of his Psychology; Huxley brought Five years after this another pre­ out Maps Place in Nature, the Lectures Darwinian was unearthed, and, like on Comparative Anatomy, and the Intro­ Patrick Matthew, in unsuspected com­ duction to the Classification of Animals; pany. Dr. W. C. Wells read a paper Wallace produced his Malay Archipelago before the Royal Society in 1813 on A and his Contributions to the Theory op White Female, Part of whose Skin re­ Natural Selection [Bates, we may here sembles that of a Negro ; but this was not add to Mr. Allen’s list, published his published till 1818, when it formed part paper on Mimicry in 1861, and his of a volume including the author’s Naturalist on the Amazons in 1863] ; famous Two Essays upon Dew and Single and Galton wrote his admirable work on Vision. In his “ Historical Sketch ” Hereditary Genius, of which his own Darwin says that Wells “ distinctly recog­ family is so remarkable an instance. nises the principle of natural selection, Tyndall and Lewes had long since signi­ and this is the first recognition which has fied their warm adhesion. At Oxford, been indicated; but he applies it only to Rolles ton was bringing up a fresh genera­ the races of man, and to certain characters tion of young biologists in the new faith; alone........ Of the accidental varieties of at Cambridge, Darwin’s old university, man, which would occur among the first a whole school of brilliant and accurate few and scattered inhabitants of the physiologists was beginning to make middle regions of Africa, some one would itself both felt and heard. In the be better fitted than the others to bear domain of anthropology Tylor was wel­ the diseases of the country. This race coming the assistance of the new ideas, would consequently multiply, while the while Lubbock was engaged on his others would decrease; not only from kindred investigations into the Origin oj their inability to sustain the attacks of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition disease, but from their incapacity of of Man. All these diverse lines of contending with their more vigorous thought both showed the widespread neighbours.” influence of Darwin’s first great work, When the simplicity of the long-hidden and led up to the preparation of his solution is brought home, we can under­ second, in which he dealt with the stand Huxley’s reflection on mastering history and development of the human �74 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION race. And what was thus true of Eng­ land was equally true of the civilised world, regarded as a whole: everywhere the great evolutionary movement was well in progress, everywhere the impulse sent forth from the quiet Kentish home was permeating and quickening the entire pulse of intelligent humanity.” The Origin of Species, as we have seen, was intended as a rough draft or preliminary outline of the theory of natural selection. The materials which Darwin had collected in support of that theory being enormous, the several books which followed between 1859 and 1881, the year before his death, were expansions of hints and parts of the pioneer book. The last to appear was that treating of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. It embodied the results of experiments which had been carried on for more than forty years, since as far back as 1837 Darwin read a paper on the subject before the Geo­ logical Society. Reference to it recalls a story, characteristic of Darwin’s innate modesty, told to the writer by the present John Murray. Darwin called on the elder Murray (presumably some time in 1880), and, after fumbling in his coat-tail pocket, drew out a packet, which he handed to Murray with the timidity of an unfledged author submitting his first manuscript. “ I have brought you,” he said, “a little thing of mine on the action of. worms on soil,” and then paused as if in doubt whether Murray would care to run the risk of bringing out the book ! One story leads to another, and our second relates to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey. Among the signa­ tures of members of Parliament, request­ ing Dean Bradley’s consent to Darwin’s interment there, was that of Mr. Richard B. Martin, partner in the well-known bank of that name, trading under the sign of the “ Grasshopper.” In his history of this old institution Mr. John B. Martin prints the following letter, which was received on the 27th April, 1882, the day after Darwin’s funeral:— ----- & Co. The accordance of a resting-place to Darwin’s remains among England’s illus­ trious dead in that Valhalla was an irenicon from Theology to one whose theories, pushed to their logical issues, have done more than any other to under­ mine the supernatural assumptions on which it is built. Not that Darwin was a man of aggressive type. If he speaks on the high matters round which, like planet tethered to sun, the spirit of man revolves by irresistible attraction, it is with hesitating voice and with no deep emotion. A man of placid temper, in whom the observing faculties were stronger than the reflective, he was content to collect and co-ordinate facts, leaving to others the work of pointing out their significance, and adjusting them, as best they could, to this or that theory. It would be unjust to say of him what John Morley says of Voltaire, that “he had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice”; but we know from his own confessions what limitations hemmed-in his emotional nature. The Life and Letters tell us that he was glad, after the more serious work and correspondence of the day were over, to listen to novels, for which he had a great love so long as they ended happily, and contained “ some person whom one can thoroughly love—if a pretty woman, so much the better.” But, strangely enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, and poetry after thirty. When at school he enjoyed Thomson, Byron, and Scott; Shelley gave him intense delight, and he was fond of Shakespeare, especially the historical plays; but in his old age he found him “so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” Sirs—We have this day drawn a check for This curious and lamentable loss of the higher the sum of ^280, which closes our account with your firm. Our reasons for thus closing an account opened so very many years ago are of so exceptional a kind that we are quite prepared to find that they are deemed wholly inadequate to the result........ They are entirely the presence of Mr. R. B. Martin at Westminster Abbey, not merely as giving sanction to the same as an individual, but appearing as one of the deputation from a Society which has especially become the endorser and sustainer of Mr. Darwin’s theories. �MODERN EVOLUTION eesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine. for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered ; and, if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. It is often said that a man’s religion concerns himself only. So far as the value of the majority of people’s opinions on such high matters goes, this is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to men whose words carry weight, or whose discoveries cause us to ask what is their bearing on the larger questions of human relations and destinies to which past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy us, or that are not compat­ ible with the facts discovered. Whatever silence Darwin maintained in his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent readers would see that, unaggressive as was the mode of presentment of his theory, it undermined current beliefs in special providence, with its special creations and contrivances, and therefore in the intermittent interference of a deity; thus excluding that supernatural action of which miracles are the decaying stock evidence. Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of natural selection by “ descent with modification ” was to apply to the human species. And when Darwin, already anticipated in this application by his more daring disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, published his Descent of Man, with its outspoken chapter on the origin of conscience and the development of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was 75 obvious that the bottom was knocked out of all traditional dogmas of man’s fall and redemption, of human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what Darwin himself believed was a matter of moment. His answers to inquiries which were made public during his life­ time told us that, while the varying circumstances and modes of life caused his judgment to often fluctuate, and that while he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, “ I think,” he says, “ that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” The chapter on “ Religion,” although a part of the autobiography, is printed separately in the Life and Letters; as the following quotation shows, it is interesting as detailing a few of the steps by which Darwin reached that suspensive stage :—Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite ortho­ dox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswer­ able authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this time—i.e., 1836 to 1839—to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question, then, continually rose before my mind, and would not be banished : Is it credible that, if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament ? This appeared to me utterly incredible. By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported —and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become —that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some I weight with me. �PIONEERS OE EVOLUTION But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress. Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered. Without doubt, the influence of the conclusions deducible from the theory of Evolution is fatal to belief in the supernatural. When we say the super­ natural, we mean that great body of assumptions out of which are constructed all theologies, the essential element in these being the intimate relation between spiritual beings, of wrhom certain qualities are predicated, and man. These beings have no longer any place in the effective belief of intelligent and unprejudiced men, because they are found to have no correspondence with the ascertained operations of nature. 2. Herbert Spencer. Contact with many “sorts and con­ ditions of men ” brings home the need of ceaselessly dinning into their ears the fact that Darwin's theory deals only with the evolution of plants and animals from a common ancestry. It is not concerned with the origin of life itself nor with those conditions preceding life which are coveredby the general term, Inorganic Evolution. Therefore, it forms but a very small part of the general theory of the origin of the earth and other bodies, “ as the sand by the seashore innumer­ able,” that fill the infinite spaces. We have seen that speculation about the universe had its rise in Ionia. After centuries of discouragement, prohibition, and, sometimes, actual persecution, it was revived, to advance, without further serious arrest, some three hundred years ago. A survey of the history of philoso­ phies . of the origin of the cosmos from the time of the renascence of inquiry shows that the great Immanuel Kant has not had his due. As remarked already, he appears to have been the first to put into shape what is known as the nebular theory. In his General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or, An Attempt to Account for the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles, published in 1775, he “pic­ tures to himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious cen­ tral body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widen­ ing the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what is gained at the. margin is lost in the centre; the attractions of the central systems bring their constituents together, which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are lie between the ruins of the worlds that have been and the chaotic materials of the worlds that shall be; and, in spite of all waste and destruction, Cosmos is extending his borders at the expense of Chaos.” Kant’s speculations were confirmed �MODERN E VOL UTION by the celebrated mathematician, La­ place. He showed that the “ rings ” rotate in the same direction as the cen­ tral body from which they were cast off ; sun, planets, and moons (those of Uranus excepted) moving in a common direction, and almost in the same plane. The probability that these harmonious move­ ments are the effects of like causes he calculated as 200,000 billions to one. The observations of the famous astro­ nomer, Sir William Herschel, which -resulted in the discovery of binary or double stars, of star-clusters, and cloud­ like nebulse (as that term implies) were further confirmations of Kant’s theory. And such modifications in this as have been made by subsequent advance in knowledge, notably by the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy (the hypo­ thesis of Kant and Laplace being based on gravitation alone), affect not the general theory of the origin of the heavenly bodies from seemingly formless, unstable, and highly diffused matter. The assumption of primitive unstable­ ness and unlikeness squares with the unequal distribution of matter ; with the movements of its masses in different directions, and at different rates ; and with the ceaseless redistribution of matter and motion. For all changes of states are due to the rearrangement of the atoms of which matter is made up, resulting in the evolution of the seeming like into the actual unlike; of the simple into the more and more complex, till— speaking of the only planet of whose life-history we can have knowledge—with the cooling of the earth to a temperature permitting of the evolution of living matter, the highest complexity is reached in the infinitely diverse forms of plants and animals. Therefore, as our know­ ledge of matter is limited to the changes of which we assume it to be the vehicle, it would seem that science reduces the universe to the intelligible concept of Motion. Since the great discovery by Kirchoff, in 1859, of the meaning of the dark lines that cross the refracted sun-rays, the T7 spectroscope has come as powerful evi­ dence in support of the nebular theory, while the photographic plate is a scarcely less important witness. The one has demonstrated that many nebulae, once thought to be star-clusters, are masses of glowing hydrogen and nitrogen gases ; that, to quote the striking communica­ tion made by the highest authority on the subject, Dr. Huggins, in his Presi­ dential Address to the British Associa­ tion, 1891, “in the part of the heavens within our ken, the stars still in the early and middle stages of evolution exceed greatly in number those which appear to be in an advanced condition of condensation.” The other, recording infallible vibrations on a sensitive plate, and securing accurate registration of the impressions, reveals, as in Dr. Roberts’s grand photograph of the nebula in Andromeda, a central mass round which are distinct rings of luminous matter, these being separated from the main body by dark rifts or spaces. To quote Dr. Huggins once more, “ We seem to have presented to us some stage of cosmical Evolution on a gigantic scale.” The great fact that lies at the back of ' all these confirmations of the nebular theory is the fundamental identity of the stuff of which the universe is made; a fact which entered into the prevision of the Ionian cosmologists. Dr. Huggins says that, “ if the whole earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very Closely the solar spectrum.” In referring to this there may be carrying of “ owls to Athens,” but that re-statements may sometimes be needful has illustration in Lord Salisbury’s Presi­ dential Address to the British Associa­ tion, 1894, wherein the assumed absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the sun’s spectrum is adduced as an argument against the theory of the common origin of the bodies of the solar system. Speaking of the predominant proportion of oxygen in the solid and liquid sub­ stances of the earth, and of the predomi­ nance of nitrogen in our atmosphere, his �78 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION Lordship asked: “If the earth be a may in some sort conceive how, by detached bit whisked off the mass of the greater skill, a complete man might be sun, as cosmogonists love to tell us, how artificially produced; but he is unable comes it that, in leaving the sun, we to conceive how such a complex cleaned him out so completely of his organism gradually arises out of a minute nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of structureless germ. That our harmonious these gases remains behind to be dis­ universe once existed potentially as covered even by the searching vision of formless diffuse matter, and has slowly the spectroscope?” If Lord Salisbury had grown into its present organised state, is consulted Dr. Huggins, or some foreign a far more astonishing fact than would astronomer of equal rank, as Duner or have been its formation after the artificial Scheiner, he would not have put a method vulgarly supposed. Those who question exposing his ignorance and hold it legitimate to argue from phe­ unmasking his prejudice. These autho­ nomena to noumena may rightly con­ rities would have told him that when a tend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies mixture of the incandescent vapours of a First Cause as much transcending ‘ the the metals and metalloids (or non- mechanical God of Paley ’ as does the metallic elementary substances, to which fetish of the savage.” class both oxygen and nitrogen belong), This quotation is from an essay on or their compounds, is examined with the “ Nebular Hypothesis,” which ap­ the spectroscope, the spectra of the peared in the Westminster Review of metalloids always yield before that of July, 1858, and which must, therefore, the metals. Hence the absence of the have been written before the eventful lines of oxygen and other metalloids, date of the reading of Darwin and carbon and silicon excepted, among the Wallace’s memorable paper before the vast crowd of lines in the solar spectrum. Linnsean Society. The author of that Then, too, in extreme states of rare­ essay is Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the faction of the sun’s absorbing layer, the foregoing extract from it may fitly pre­ absorption of the oxygen is too small face a brief account of his life-work in to be sensible to us. co-ordinating the manifold branches of “ While the genesis of the Solar knowledge into a synthetic whole. In System, and of countless other systems erecting a complete theory of Evolution like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, on a purely scientific basis “his pro­ the ultimate mystery continues as great found and vigorous writings,” to quote as ever. The problem of existence is Huxley, “embody the spirit of Des­ not solved; it is simply removed further cartes in the knowledge of our own day.” back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws Laying the foundation of his massive no light on the origin of diffused matter; structure in early manhood, Mr. Spencer and diffused matter as much needs has had the rare satisfaction of placing accounting for as concrete matter. The the topmost stone on the building which genesis of an atom is not easier to his brain devised and his hand upreared. • conceive than the genesis of a planet. While the sheets of this little book are Nay, indeed, so far from making the being passed for press there arrives the universe a less mystery than before, it third volume of the Principles of Socio­ makes it a greater mystery. Creation logy, which completes Mr. Spencer’s by manufacture is a much lower thing “ Synthetic Philosophy.” In the preface than creation by Evolution. A man to this the venerable author says :— can put together a machine; but he “ On looking back over the six-andcannot make a machine develop itself. thirty years which I have passed since The ingenious artisan, able as some the 1 Synthetic Philosophy ’ was com­ have been so far to imitate vitality as to menced, I am surprised at my audacity produce a mechanical pianoforte player, in undertaking it, and still more sur- �MODERN EVOLUTION 79 prised by its completion. In 1860 my small youth collected plants and insects knows resources had been nearly all frittered not half the halo of interest which lanes away in writing and publishing books and hedgerows can assume.” He was which did not repay their expenses ; and articled in his seventeenth year to a I was suffering under a chronic disorder, railway engineer, and followed that pro­ caused by overtax of brain, in 1855, fession until he was twenty-five. During which, wholly disabling me for eighteen this period he wrote various papers for months, thereafter limited my work to the Civil Engineers’ and Architects’ three hours a day, and usually to less. Journal and, what is of importance to How insane my project must have note, a series of letters to the Noncon­ seemed to onlookers may be judged formist in 1842 on “ The Proper Sphere from the fact that before the first of Government” (republished as a pamph­ chapter of the first volume was finished let in 1844), in which “the only point of one of my nervous breakdowns obliged community with the general doctrine of Evolution is a belief in the modifiability me to desist.” “ But imprudent courses do not always of human nature through adaptation to fail. Sometimes a forlorn hope is justified conditions, and a consequent belief in by the event. Though, along with other human progression.” After giving up deterrents, many relapses, now lasting engineering, Mr. Spencer joined the for weeks, now for months, and once for staff of the Economist, and while thus years, often made me despair of reaching employed published, in 1850, his first the end, yet at length the end is reached. important book, Social Statics, or the Doubtless in earl er years some exulta­ Conditions essential to Human Happiness tion would have resulted; but as age Specified, and the first of them Developed. creeps on. feelings weaken, and now my In a footnote to the later editions of this work Mr. Spencer points out a chief pleasure is in my emancipation. Still there is satisfaction in the conscious­ brace of paragraphs in the chapter on ness that losses, discouragements, and “ General Considerations ” in which shattered health have not prevented me “ may be seen the first step toward the general doctrine of Evolution.” After from fulfilling the purpose of my life.” These words recall a parallel invited referring to the analogy between the sub­ by Gibbon’s record of his feelings on the division of labour, which goes on in completion of his immortal work, when, human society as it advances, and the z walking under the acacias of his garden gradual diminution in the number of like at Lausanne, he pondered on the parts and the multiplication of unlike “ recovery of his freedom, and perhaps parts which are observable in the higher the establishment of his fame,” but with animals, Mr. Spencer says :— “ Now, just the same coalescence of a “sober melancholy” at the thought that “he had taken an everlasting leave like parts and separation of unlike ones —-just the same increasing subdivision of an old and agreeable companion.” Herbert Spencer, spiritual descen­ of function—takes place in the develop­ dant—longo intervallo—of Heraclitus ment of society. The earliest social and Lucretius, was born at Derby on organisms consist almost wholly of repe­ the 27th April, 1820. His father was a titions of one element. Every man is a warrior, hunter, fisherman, builder, agri­ schoolmaster, a man of scientific tastes, and, it is interesting to note, secretary of culturist, toolmaker. Each portion of the Derby Philosophical Association the community performs the same duties with every other portion ; much as each founded by Erasmus Darwin. In Mr. slice of the polyp’s body is alike stomach, Spencer’s book on Education there are muscle, skin, and lungs. Even the hints of his inheritance of the father’s chiefs, in whom a tendency towards bent as an observer and lover of nature separateness of function first appears, in the remark that “ whoever has not in �8o PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION still retain their similarity to the rest in thought of human interests everywhere economic respects. The next stage is pervades them; social and ethical distinguished by a segregation of these . questions are kept in the van through­ social units into a few distinct classes— out. Philosophy is brought from her warriors, priests, and slaves. A further high seat to mix in the sweet amenities advance is seen in the sundering of the of home, in the discipline of camp, in labourers into different castes, having the rivalry of market; and linked to special occupations, as among the Hin­ conduct. Conduct is defined as “ acts doos. And, without further illustration, adjusted to ends,” the perfecting of the the reader will at once perceive that adjustment being the highest aim, so from these inferior types of society, up to that “ the greatest totality of life in self, our own complicated and more perfect in offspring, and in fellow-men ” is one, the progress has ever been of the secured, the limit of evolution of conduct same nature. While he will also per­ not being reached “ until, beyond avoid­ ceive that this coalescence of like parts, ance of direct and indirect injuries to as seen in the concentration of particu­ others, there are spontaneous efforts to lar manufactures in particular districts, further the welfare of others.” Emerson and this separation of agents having puts this ideal into crisp form wrhen he separate functions, as seen in the more speaks of the time in which a man shall and more minute division of labour, are care more that he wrongs not his neigh­ still going on. bour than that his neighbour wrongs “ Thus do we find, not only that the him ; then will his “ market-cart become analogy between a society and a living a chariot of the sun.” creature is borne out to a degree quite That humanity is the pivot round unsuspected by those who commonly which Mr. Spencer’s philosophic system draw it, but also that the same definition revolves is seen in the earliest Essays, of life applies to both. This union of and notably in his making mental evo­ many men into one community—this lution the subject of the first instalment increasing mutual dependence of units of his Synthetic Philosophy. For, inwhich were originally independent—this the Principles of Psychology, published formation of a whole consisting of unlike in 1855, he limits feeling or conscious­ parts—this growth of an organism, of ness to animals possessing a nervous which one portion cannot be injured system, and traces its beginnings in the without the rest feeling it—may all be “ blurred, undetermined feeling answer­ generalised under the law of individua­ ing to a single pulsation or shock ” (as, tion. The development of society, as for example, to go no lower down the well as the development of man and the life-scale, in the medusa or jelly-fish), to development of life generally, may be its highest form as self-consciousness, or described as a tendency to individuate—- knowing that we know, in man. This to become a thing. And, rightly inter­ dominant element in Mr. Spencer’s preted, the manifold forms of progress philosophy secures it a life and per­ going on around us are uniformly signifi­ manence which, had it been restricted cant of this tendency.” to explaining the mechanics of the Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum inorganic universe, it could never have puto : “ I am a man, and nothing human possessed. It has been observed how is foreign to me.” This oft-quoted the Darwinian theory aroused attention saying of the old farmer in the Self­ in all quarters because it touched human Tormentor of Terence might be affixed interests on every side. And, although as motto to Herbert Spencer’s writings less obvious to the multitude, the Syn­ from the tractate on the Proper Sphere thetic Philosophy, dealing with all cos­ of Government to the concluding volume mic processes as purely mechanical of the Principles of Sociology. For problems, interprets “ the phenomena of �W01)Jí/W"E VOLUTTV& life (excluding the question of its origin), mind, and society, in terms of matter and motion.” Anticipating the levelling of epithets against such apparent mate­ rialising of mental phenomena involved in that method, Spencer remarks on the dismay with which men, who have not risen above the vulgar conception which unites with matter the contemptuous epithets “gross” and “brute,” regard the proposal to reduce the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a level which they think so degraded. “ Whoever remembers that the forms of existence which the uncultivated speak of with so much scorn are shown by the man of science to be the more marvellous in their attributes the more they are investigated, and are also proved to be in their ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible—as absolutely incom­ prehensible as sensation, or the con­ scious something which perceives it— whoever clearly recognises this truth will see that the course proposed does not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, but an elevation of the so-called lower. Perceiving, as he will, that the Materialist and Spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words—in which the disputants are equally absurd, each thinking that he understands that which it is impossible for any man to under­ stand—he will perceive how utterly groundless is the fear referred to. Being fully convinced that, no matter what nomenclature is used, the ultimate mystery must remain the same, he will be as ready to formulate all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force, as in any other terms; and will rather indeed anticipate that only in a doctrine Which recognises the Unknown Cause as co-extensive with all orders of pheno­ mena can there be a consistent reli­ gion or a consistent philosophy.” This is clear enough; yet such is the crass density of some objectors that eighteen years after the above was written Mr. Spencer, in answering criti­ cisms on First Principles, had to rebut the charge that he believed matter to 81 consist of “space-occupying units,having shape and measurement.” The Principles of Psychology was both preceded and followed by a series of essays in which the process of change from the “homogeneous to the hetero­ geneous ”—i.e., from the seeming like to the actual unlike—was expounded. Mr. Spencer tells us that in 1852 he first became acquainted with von Baer’s Law of Development, or the changes under­ gone in each living thing, from the general to the special, during its advance from the embryonic to the fully-formed state. That law confirmed the prevision indicated in the passages quoted above from Social Statics, and impressed him as one of the three doctrines which are indispensable elements of the general theory of Evolution. The other two are the Correlation of the Physical Forces, or the transformation of different modes of motion into other modes of motion, as of heat or light into electricity, and so forth, in Proteus-like fashion; and the Conservation of Energy, or the indes­ tructibility of matter and motion, what­ ever changes or transformations these may undergo. In permitting the quotation of the useful abstract of the Synthetic Philo­ sophy which, originally drawn up for the late Professor Youmans, was embodied in a letter to the Athenaeum of July 22nd, 1882, Mr. Spencer was good enough to volunteer the following details to the writer :— “You are probably aware that the conception set forth in that abstract was reached by slow steps during many years. These steps occurred as follows :— 1850. Social Statics: especially chap­ ter ‘General Considerations.’ (Higher human Evolution.) 1852. March. ‘Development Hypo­ thesis,’ in the Leader. (Evo­ lution of Species), vid. ante, p. hi. 1852. April. ‘Theory of Population,’ etc., in Westminster Review. (Higher human Evolution. ) G �82 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION 1854. July. ‘ The Genesis of Science’ I (Essays, vol. i., 1883 edition ; “ Manners in British Quarterly Review. and Fashion,” p. 65). “Scientific advance is as much from (Intellectual Evolution.) 1855. July. Principles of Psychology. the special to the general as from the (Mental Evolution in general.) general to the special. Quite in harmony 1857. April. ‘Progress: its Law and with this wTe find to be the admissions Cause Westminster Review. that the sciences are as branches of one trunk, and that they were at first culti­ (Evolution at large.) 1857. April. ‘ Ultimate Laws of Phy­ vated simultaneously ; and this becomes siology.’ National Review. the more marked on finding, as wre have (Another factor of Evolution done, not only that the sciences have a common root, but that science in general at large.) has a common root with language, classi­ “ From these last two Essays came the fication, reasoning, art; that throughout inception of the Synthetic Philosophy. civilisation these have advanced together, The first programme of it was drawn up acting and reacting on each other just in January, 1858.”....... as the separate sciences have done ; and When seeing Mr. Spencer on the that thus the development of intelligence subject of this letter, he took the further in all its divisions and subdivisions has trouble to point out certain passages in conformed to this same law to which we the essays originally comprised in the have shown the sciences conform ” (/A, one-volume edition of 1858 which “The Genesis of Science,”pp. 191, 192). (In correspondence with this, recog­ contain germinal ideas of his synthesis. nising that the same method has to be That they are his selection will add to the interest and value of their quotation, adopted in all inquiry, whether we deal revealing, as perchance they may, a with the body or the mind, the fragment of the autobiography which following may be quoted from Hume’s it is an open secret Mr. Spencer has Treatise on Human Nature: “:Tis evident that all the sciences have written:— a relation, greater or less, to human “ That Law, Religion, and Manners nature ; and that, however wide any of are thus related—that their respective them may seem to run from it, they kinds of operation come under one still return back by one passage or generalisation—that they have in certain another. Even Mathematics, Natural contrasted characteristics of men a com­ Philosophy, and Natural Religion are in mon support and a common danger— some measure dependent on the science will, however, be most clearly seen on of Man, since they lie under the cogni­ discovering that they have a common sance of men, and are judged of by their origin. Little as from present appear­ powers and qualities.”) “The analogy between individual ances wre should suppose it, we shall yet find that, at first, the control of religion, organisms and the social organisms is the control of laws, and the control of one that has in all ages forced itself on manners, were all one control. However the attention of the observant........ While incredible it may now seem, we believe it is becoming clear that there are no it to be demonstrable that the rules of such special parallelisms between the etiquette, the provisions of the statute- constituent parts of a man and those of book, and the commands of the deca­ a nation, as have been thought to exist, logue, have grown from the same root. it is also becoming clear that the general If we go far back enough into the ages principles of development and structure of primeeval fetishism, it becomes mani­ displayed in all organised bodies are displayed in societies also. The funda­ fest that originally Deity, Chief, and Master of the Ceremonies were identical” mental characteristic both of societies �MODERN EVOLUTION and of living creatures is, that they con­ sist of mutually dependent parts ; and it would seem that this involves a com­ munity of various other characteristics. ....... Meanwhile, if any such correspond­ ence exists, it is clear that Biology and Sociology will more or less interpret each other. “ One of the positions we have endea­ voured to establish is, that in animals the process of development is carried on, not by differentiations only, but by subordinate integrations. Now in the social organism we may see the same duality of process ; and, further, it is to be observed that the integrations are of the same three kinds. Thus we have integrations that arise from the simple growth of adjacent parts that perform like functions ; as, for instance, the coalescence of Manchester with its calico-weaving suburbs. We have other integrations that arise when, out of several places producing a particular commodity, one monopolises more and more of the business, and leaves the rest to dwindle ; as witness the growth of the Yorkshire cloth districts at the ex­ pense of those in the west of England. ....... And we have yet those other inte­ grations that result from the actual approximation of the similarly-occupied parts, whence result such facts as the concentration of publishers in Paternoster Row, of lawyers in the Temple and neighbourhood, of corn merchants about Mark Lane, of civil engineers in Great George Street, of bankers in the centre of the city” (Essays, vol. iii., 1878 edition; “Transcendental Physiology,” pp. 414-416). But, divested of technicalities, and summarised in words to be “ understanded of the people,” the following quotation from the Essay on “ Progress : its Law and Cause,” gives the gist of the Synthetic Philosophy :— “We believe we have shown beyond question that that which the, German physiologists (von Baer, Wolff, and others) have found to be the law of «3 organic development (as of seed into a tree, and of an egg into an animal) is the law of all development. The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations (/.<?., the appearance of differences in the parts of a seemingly like substance), is seen alike in the earliest changes of the universe to which we can reason our way back, and in the earlier changes which we can inductively establish ; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the earth, and of every single organism on its surface ; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilised individual or in the aggre gation of races; it is seen in the evolu­ tion of society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its econo­ mical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life. From the remotest past which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in which progress essentially consists is the transformation of the homogeneous into the hetero­ geneous ” (Essays, vol. i.; 1883 ; p. 30). To this may fitly follow the “ succinct statement of the cardinal principles developed in the successive works ” which Mr. Spencer, as named above, prepared for Professor Youmans :— 1. Throughout the universe in general, and in detail, there is an unceasing re­ distribution of matter and motion. 2. This redistribution constitutes evolu­ tion when there is a predominant integra­ tion of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes dissolution when there is a predominant absorption of motion and disintegration of matter. 3. Evolution is simple when the pro­ cess of integration, or the formation of a coherent aggregate, proceeds uncom­ plicated by other processes. 4. Evolution is compound when, along with this primary change from an inco­ herent to a coherent state, there go on secondary changes due to differences in �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION the circumstances of the different parts of the aggregate. 5. These secondary changes constitute a transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous—a transformation which, like the first, is exhibited in the universe as a whole, and in all (or nearly all) its details ; in the aggregate of stars and nebulae ; in the planetary system; in the earth as an inorganic mass; in each organism, vegetal or animal (von Baer’s law otherwise ex­ pressed) ; in the aggregate of organisms throughout geologic time; in the mind ; in society; in all products of social activity. 6. The process of integration, acting locally as well as generally, combines with the process of differentiation to render this change not simply from homogeneity to heterogeneity, but from an indefinite homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity; and this trait of increas­ ing definiteness, which accompanies the trait of increasing heterogeneity, is, like it, exhibited in the totality of things, and in all its divisions and subdivisions down to the minutest. 7. Along with this redistribution of the matter composing any evolving aggre­ gate there goes on a redistribution of the retained motion of its components in relation to one another; this also becomes, step by step, more definitely heterogeneous. 8. In the absence of a homogeneity that is infinite and absolute, that redis­ tribution, of which evolution is one phase, is inevitable. The causes which necessitate it are these 9. The instability of the homogeneous, which is consequent upon the different exposures of the different parts of any limited aggregate to incident forces. The transformations hence resulting are :—10. The multiplication of effects. Every mass and part of a mass on which a force falls subdivides and differentiates that force, which there­ upon proceeds to work a variety of changes; and each of these becomes the parent of similarly - multiplying changes; the multiplication of them becoming greater in proportion as the aggregate becomes more heterogeneous. And these two causes of increasing differentiations are furthered by 11. Segregation, which is a process tending ever to separate unlike units and to bring together like units; so serving continually to sharpen, or make definite, differentiations otherwise caused. 12. Equilibration is the final result of these transformations which an evolving aggregate undergoes. The changes go on until there is reached an equilibrium between the forces which all parts of the aggregate are exposed to and the forces these parts oppose to them. Equilibration may pass through a transition stage of balanced motions (as in a planetary system) or of balanced functions (as in a living body) on the way to ultimate equilibrium; but the state of rest in inorganic bodies, or death in organic bodies, is the necessary limit of the changes constituting evo­ lution. 13. Dissolution is the counter-change which sooner or later every evolved aggregate undergoes. Remaining exposed to surrounding forces that are unequili­ brated, each aggregate is ever liable to be dissipated by the increase, gradual or sudden, of its contained motion; and its dissipation, quickly undergone by bodies lately animate, and slowly under­ gone by inanimate masses, remains to be undergone at an indefinitely remote period by each planetary and stellar mass, which since an indefinitely distant period in the past has been slowly evolving; the cycle of its transforma­ tions being thus completed. 14. This rhythm of evolution and dissolution, completing itself during short periods in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates distributed through space completing itself in periods im­ measurable by human thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal —each alternating phase of the process predominating now in this region of �MODERN EVOLUTION Space and now in that, as local con­ ditions determine. 15. All these phenomena, from their great features down to their minutest details, are necessary results of the per­ sistence of force under its forms of matter and motion. Given these as distributed through space, and their quantities being unchangeable, either by increase or decrease, there inevitably result the continuous redistributions distinguishable as evolution and dis­ solution, as well as all these special traits above enumerated. 16. That which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the universe presents to us, transcends human knowledge and conception—is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognise as without limit in space and without beginning or end in time. All that is comprised in the dozen volumes which, exclusive of the minor works and the Sociological Tables,form the great body of the Synthetic Philosophy, is the expansion of this abstract. The general lines laid down in that Philo­ sophy have become a permanent way along which investigation will continue to travel. The revisions which may be called for will not affect it fundamentally, being limited to details, more especially in the settlement of the relative functions of individuals and communities, and cognate questions. Into these we cannot enter here. Suffice it that to those who have the rare possession of sound mental peptics, no more nutritive diet can be recommended than is supplied by First Principles and the works in which its theses are developed. For those who, blessed with good diges­ tion, lack leisure, there is provided in a convenient volume the excellent epitome which Mr. Howard Collins has pre­ pared. The prospectus of the then proposed issue of the series of works which, begin­ ning with First Principles, ends with the Principles of Sociology (1862-1896), was 35 issued by Mr. Spencer in March, i860. Through his courtesy the writer has seen the documents which prove that the first draft of that prospectus was written out on the 6th January, 1858, and that it was the occasion of an interesting corre­ spondence between Mr. Spencer and his father—-mainly in the form of questions from the latter—during that month. The record of these facts is of some moment as evidencing that the scheme of the Synthetic Philosophy took definite shape in 1857. Therefore, the Theory of Evolution, dealing with the universe as a whole, was formulated some months before the publication of the DarwinWallace paper, in which only organic evolution was discussed. The Origin of Species, as the outcome of that paper, showed that the action of natural selec­ tion is a sufficing cause for the production of new life-forms, and thus knocked the bottom out of the old belief in special creation. The general doctrine of Evolution, however, is not so vitally related to that of natural selection that the two stand or fall together. The evidence as to the connection between the succession of past life-forms which, regard being had to the well-nigh obliterated record, has been supplied by the fossil-yielding rocks ; and the evidence as to the un­ broken development of the highest plants and animals from the lowest, which more and more confirms the theory of von Baer ; alike furnish a body of testimony placing the doctrine of Organic Evolution on a foundation that can never be shaken. And, firm as that, stands the doctrine of Inorganic Evolution upon the support given by modern science to the speculations of Immanuel Kant. There is the more need for laying stress on this because recent discussions, revealing divided opinions among biolo­ gists as to the sufficiency of natural selection as a cause of all modifications in the structure of living things, lead timid or half-informed minds to hope that the doctrine of Evolution may yet �86 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION turn out not to be true. It is in such stratum of intelligence that there lurks the feeling, whenever some old inscrip­ tion or monument verifying statements in the Bible is discovered, that the infallibility of that book has further proof. For example, until the present year, not a single confirmatory piece of evidence as to the story of the Exodus was forthcoming from Egypt itself. Even the inscription which has come to light does not, in the judgment of such an expert as Dr. Flinders Petrie, supply the exact confirmation desired. But let that irrefragable witness appear, and while the historian will welcome it as evidence of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt— thus throwing light on the movements of races, and adding to the historical value of the Pentateuch—the average orthodox believer will feel a vague sort of satis­ faction that the foundations of his belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation are somehow strengthened. 3. Thomas Henry Huxley. Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4th, 1825. Montaigne tells us that he was “borne between eleven of the clock and noone,” and, with like quaint precision, Huxley gives the hour of his birth as “ about eight o’clock in the morning.” Speaking of his first Christian name, he humorously said that, by curious chance, his parents chose that of the particular apostle with whom, as the doubting member of the twelve, he had always felt most sym­ pathy. Concerning his father, who was “ one of the masters in a large semi-public school ” (the father of Herbert Spencer, it will be remembered, was also a school­ master), Huxley has little to say in the slight autobiographical sketch reprinted as an introduction to the first volume of the Collected Essays. On that side, he tells us, he could find hardly any trace in himself, except a certain faculty for drawing, and a certain hotness of temper. “ Physically and mentally,” he was the son of his mother, “a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament.” His school training was brief and profitless; his tastes were mechanical, and, but for lack of means, he would have started life in the same profession which Herbert Spencer followed till he forsook Messrs. Fox’s office for journalism. So, with a certain shrinking from anatomical work, Huxley studied medicine for a time under a relative, and in his seventeenth year entered the Charing Cross Hospital School as a student. In those days there was no instruction in physics, and only in such branch of chemistry as dealt with the nature of drugs. Non multa> sed multum^ and what was lacking in breadth was, perhaps, gained in thoroughness. Huxley had as excellent a teacher in Wharton Jones as the latter had a promising pupil in Huxley, and in working with the microscope, the evidence of that came in his discovery of a certain root-sheath in the hair, which has since then been known as “ Huxley’s layer.” Up to the time of his studentship he had been left, intellectually, altogether to his own devices. He tells us that he was a voracious and omnivorous reader, “ a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every sub­ ject which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience.” Among the books and essays that impressed him were Guizot’s History of Civilisation and Sir William Hamilton’s essay, “ On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” which he accidentally came upon in an odd volume of the Edinburgh Review. This, he adds, was “ devoured with avidity,” and it stamped upon his mind the strong conviction “ that on even the most solemn and important of ques­ tions men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers, and that the limita­ tion of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.” Thus, �MODERN EVOLUTION 87 before he was out of his teens, the packet of separate copies ” awaited him. philosophy that ruled his life-teaching It dealt with the anatomy and affinities of the Medusse, and the original research was taking definite shape. In 1845 he won his M.B. London which it evidenced justified his election with honours in anatomy and physiology, in 1851 to the fellowship of the society and after a few months’ practice at the whose presidential chair he was in after East-end applied, at the instance of his years to adorn. He would seem to senior fellow-student, Mr. (afterwards have won the blue ribbon of science Sir) Joseph Fayrer, for an appointment per saltum. Probably, so far as their in the medical service of the Navy. At biological value is concerned, nothing the end of two months he was fortunate that he did subsequently has surpassed enough to be entered on the books of his contributions to scientific literature Nelson’s old ship, the Victory, for duty at that period; but if his services to at Haslar Hospital. His official chief knowledge had been limited to the class was the famous Arctic explorer, Sir of work which they represent, he would John Richardson, through whose recom­ have remained only a distinguished mendation he was appointed, seven specialist. Further recognition of his months later, assistant surgeon of the well-won position came in the award of Rattlesnake. That ship, commanded by the society’s royal medal. But fellow­ Captain Owen Stanley, was commissioned ships and medals keep no wolf from the to survey the intricate passage within door, and Huxley was a poor man. the Barrier Reef skirting the eastern After vain attempts to obtain, first, a shores of Australia, and to explore the professorship of physiology in England, sea lying between the northern end of and then a chair of natural history at that reef and New Guinea. It was the Toronto (Tyndall was at the same time best apprenticeship to what was even­ an unsuccessful candidate for the chair tually the work of Huxley’s life—the of physics in the same university), a solution of biological problems and the settled position was secured by Sir indication of their far-reaching signifi­ Henry de la B eche’s offer of the pro­ cance. Darwin and Hooker had passed fessorship of palaeontology, and of the through a like marine curriculum. The lectureship on natural history in the former served as naturalist on board the Royal School of Mines, vacated by Beagle when she sailed on her voyage Edward Forbes. That was in 1854. Between that date and the time of his round the world in 1831; the latter as assistant-surgeon on board the Erebus return Huxley had contributed a number of valuable papers on the structure of on her Antarctic Expedition in 1839. Fortune was to bring the three shoulder the invertebrates, and on histology, or to shoulder when the battle against the the science of tissues. But these, while theory of the immutability of species was adding to his established qualifications for a scientific appointment, demand no fought. detailed reference here. With both During his four years’ absence Huxley, in whom the biologist dominated the chairs there was united the curatorship doctor, made observations on the various of the fossil collections in the Museum marine animals collected. These he of Practical Geology, and these, with sent home to the Linnean Society in the inspectorship of salmon fisheries, the vain hope of acceptance. A more which office he accepted in 1881, com­ elaborate paper to the Royal Society, plete the list of Huxley’s more important communicated through the Bishop of public appointments. He surrendered Norwich (author of a book on birds, them all in 1885, having reached the and father of Dean Stanley), secured age at which, as he jocosely remarked to the coveted honour of publication, and the writer, “every scientific man ought on Huxley’s return in 1850 a “huge to be poleaxed.” Perhaps he dreaded �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION the conservatism of attitude, the non­ receptivity to new ideas, which often accompany old age. But for himself such fears were needless. He was never of robust constitution; in addition to the lasting effects of an illness in boy­ hood, Carlyle’s “accursed Hag,” dys­ pepsia, which troubled both Darwin and Bates for the rest of their lives after their return from abroad, troubled him. Therefore considerations of health mainly prompted the surrender of his varied official responsibilities, the loyal discharge of which met with becoming recognition in the grant of a pension. This secured a modest competence in the evening of life to one who had never been wealthy, and who had never coveted wealth. To Huxley may fitly be applied what Faraday said of himself, that he had “no time to make money.” And yet, to his abiding discredit, the present editor of Punch allowed his theological animus, which had already been shown in abortive attempts in the pages of that facetious ” journal to appraise a Roman Catholic biologist at the expense of Huxley, to further degrade itself by affixing the letters “L.S.D.” to his name in a character-sketch. His public life may be said to date from 1854. The duties which he then undertook included the delivery of a course of lectures to working men every alternate year. Some of these—models of their kind—have been reissued in the Collected Essays. Among the most notable are those on “ Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature.” At the outset of his public career lecturing was as distasteful to him as in earlier years the trouble of writing was detestable. But mother wit and “needs must” trained him in a short time to win the ear of an audience. One evening in 1852 he made his debut at the Royal Institution, and the next day he received a letter charging him with every possible fault that a lecturer could commit—ungraceful stoop, awk­ wardness in use of hands, mumbling of words, or dropping them down the shirt front. The lesson was timely, and its effect salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and it is worth recording —if but as encouragement to stammerers who have something to say—at what price he “ bought this freedom ” which held an audience spellbound. How he thus held it in later years they will remember who, in the packed theatre of the Royal Institution, listened, on the evening of Friday, April 9th, 1880, to his lecture, “ On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species.” In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps with Tyndall, the result appearing in their joint authorship of a paper on “ Glacial Phenomena ” in the Philosophical Transactions of the follow­ ing year. But this was a rare interlude. What time could be wrested from daily routine was given to the study of in­ vertebrate and vertebrate morphology, palaeontology, and ethnology, familiarity with which was no mean equipment for the conflict soon to rage round these seemingly pacific materials when their deep import was declared. The out­ come of such varied industry is apparent to the student of scientific memoirs. But a recital of the titles of papers con­ tributed to these, as, e.g., “On Ceratodus,” “ Hyperodapedon Gordoni,” “ Hypsilophodon,” “ Telerpeton,” and so forth, will not here tend to edification. The original and elaborate investigations which they embody have had recognition in the degrees and medals which decorated the illustrious author. But it is not by these that Huxley’s renown as one of the most richly-endowed and widely - cultured personalities of the Victorian era will endure. They might sink into oblivion which buries most purely technical work without in any way affecting that foremost place which he fills in the ranks of philo­ sophical biologists both as clear-headed thinker and luminous interpreter. In this high function the publication of the Origin of Species gave him his opportunity. That was in 1859. As with Hooker and Bates, his experiences �MODERN EVOLUTION aS a traveller, and, more than this, his penetrating inquiry into significances and relations, prepared his mind for acceptance of the theory of descent with modification of living forms from one stock. Hence the mutability, as against the old theory of the fixity, of species. In the chapter, “On the Reception of the Origin of Species,” which Huxley contributed to Darwin’s Life and Letters, he gives an interesting account of his attitude towards that burning question. He says :— “ I think that I must have read the Vestiges (see p. 109) before I left England in 1846, but if I did the book made very little impression upon me, and I was not brought into serious contact with the ‘ species ’ question until after 1850. At that time I had long done with the Pentateuchal cos­ mogony which had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbiassed in respect of any doctrine which presented itself if it professed to be based on purely philosophical and scientific reasoning. ....... I had not then, and I have not now, the smallest a priori objection to raise to the account of the creation of animals and plants given in Paradise Lost, in which Milton so vividly embodies the natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to say that it is untrue because it is im­ possible. I confine myself to what must be regarded as a modest and reasonable request for some particle of evidence that the existing species of animals and plants did originate in that way as a condition of my belief in a statement which appears to me to be highly improbable....... “ And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to give to the evolutionists of 1851-58. Within the ranks of the biologists of that time I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant, of 89 University College, who had a word to say for Evolution, and his advocacy was ! not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks the only person known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was at the same time a thoroughgoing evo­ lutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds 3 of a friendship which I am happy to 1 think has known no interruption. Many 1 and prolonged were the battles we fought 1 on this topic. But even my friend’s ] rare dialectic skill and copiousness of ' apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand j upon two grounds : firstly, that up to I that time the evidence in favour of I transmutation was wholly insufficient; and, secondly, that no suggestion respect­ ing the causes of the transmutation assumed which had been made was in any way adequate to explain .the pheno­ mena. Looking back at the state of ] knowledge at that time, I really do not 1 see that any other conclusion was justi­ fiable. “ As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who : thought seriously about the matter were j very much in my own state of mind —-1 inclined to say to both Mosaists and 1 Evolutionists, ‘A plague on both your houses !’ and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to labour in the fertile fields 1 of ascertainable facts. And I may there­ fore further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers ini 1858, and still more that of the Origin in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has! lost himself in a dark night suddenly! reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes! his way. That which we were looking] for and could not find was a hypothesis! respecting the origin of known organic! forms which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved) to be actually at work. We wanted, not �90 PI0NEERS OF E VOL UTION to pin . our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts, and have their validity tested. The Origin pro­ vided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma—Refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner ? In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later we reproached ourselves with dulness for being per­ plexed by such an inquiry. My reflec­ tion, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin, was: ‘ How extremely stupid not to have thought of that !’ I suppose that Columbus’s com­ panions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for exist­ ence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough, but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted.” But the disciple soon outstripped the master. As was said of Luther in relation to Erasmus, Huxley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in the Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to its obvious conclusion: Darwin only hinted that it “ would throw much light on the origin of man and his history.” His silence, as he candidly tells us in the Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to a desire “ not to add to the prejudices against his views.” No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent. In the spirit of Plato’s Laws, he followed the argument whithersoever it led. In i860 he delivered a course of lectures to working men “On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals,” and in 1862 a couple of lectures on the same subject at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. The important and significant feature of these discourses was the demonstration that no cerebral barrier divides man from apes; that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction between him and the lower animals is futile; and that “even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.” The lectures were published in 1863 in a volume entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature; and it was with pride warranted by the results of subsequent researches that Huxley, in a letter to the writer, thus refers to the book when arranging for its reissue among the Collected Essays I was looking through Man's Place in Nature the other day. I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add, except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it 'would certainly ruin all my prospects. The sparse annotations to the whole series of reprinted matter show that the like permanence attends all his writings. And yet, true workman, with ideal ever lying ahead, as he was, he remarked to the writer that never did a book come hot from the press but he wished that he could suppress it and rewrite it. But before dealingwith the momentous issues raised in Man's Place in Nature we must return to i860. For that was the “ Sturm und Drang ” period. Then, at Oxford, “ home of lost causes,” as Matthew Arnold apostrophises her in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism, was fought, on Saturday, 30th June, a memorable duel between biologist and bishop; perhaps in its issues more memorable than the historic discussion on the traditional doctrine of special creation between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the French Academy in 1830. Both Huxley and Wilberforce were doughty champions. The scene of com­ bat, the Museum Library, was crammed to suffocation. Fainting women were carried out. There had been “words” between Owen and Huxley on the previous Thursday. Owen contended �MODERN EVOLUTION that there were certain fundamental differences between the brains of man and apes. Huxley met this with “direct and unqualified contradiction,” and pledged himself to “justify that unusual •procedure elsewhere.” No wonder that the atmosphere was electric. The bishop was up to time. Declamation usurped the vacant place of argument in his speech, and the declamation became acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape. “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” whispered Huxley to a friend at his side, as he rose to reply. After setting his opponent an example in demonstrating his case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, evoked no admission of error from him then or ever after, Huxley referred to the personal remark of Wilberforce. And this is what he said:— I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.' If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific ques­ tions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is now ancient history is to quote the admissions made by Lord Salisbury —a rigid High Churchman—in his Presidential Address to the British Asso­ ciation in this same city of Oxford in 1894:— Few now are found to doubt that animals Separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors........ Darwin has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species. Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life-forms have a common origin; plants and animals being alike built-up of matter which is identical in character. This doctrine, to-day a commonplace of biology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a capful of wind compared with that which raged round Huxley’s lecture on The Physical Basis of Life, delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a “ Sabbath ” evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People had settled down, with more or less vague under­ standing of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which represented the elementary substances entering into the composition of every living thing from a jelly-speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper to that bottle take their breath away ! Microscopists, philosophers “so-called,” and clerics alike raised the cry of “gross material» ism,” never pausing to read Huxley’s anticipatory answer to the baseless charge, an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the essay on Descartes’s Discourse Touching the Method of Using One's Reason Rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest idealism. “All the pheno­ mena of nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness.” The cyclone thus raised travelled westward on the heels of Tyn­ dall, when in 1874 he asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and inorganic; dashing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that “ the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of the sun.” The ancient belief in “spontaneous, generation,” which Redi’s experiments upset, was the subject of Huxley’s Presidential Address to the British Asso­ ciation in 1870. But while he showed �PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION how subsequent investigation confirmed omitted to lay stress on the obscurity the doctrine of Abiogenesis, or the non­ which still hides the causes of variation production of living from dead matter, which, it must be kept in mind, natural he made this statement in support of selection cannot bring about, and on Tyndall’s creed as to the fundamental which it can only act. He insists on unity of the vital and the non-vital the non-implication of the larger theory “ Looking back through the prodigious with its subordinate parts, or with the vista of the past, I find no record of the fate of them. The “ doctrine of Evolu­ commencement of life, and therefore I tion is a generalisation of certain facts am devoid of any means of forming a which may be observed by any one who definite conclusion as to the conditions will take the necessary trouble.” The of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific facts are those which biologists class sense of the word, is a serious matter, under the heads of Embryology and and needs strong foundations. To say, Palaeontology, to the conclusions from therefore, in the admitted absence of which J‘all future philosophical and evidence, that I have any belief as to theological speculations will have to the mode in which the existing forms of accommodate themselves.” life have originated would be using That is the direction of the revolution words in a wrong sense. But expecta­ to which the publication of Maris Place tion is. permissible where belief is not; in Nature gave impetus ; and it is in and if it were given to me to look beyond the all-round application of the theory the abyss of geologically recorded time of man’s descent that Huxley stands to the still more remote period when foremost, both as leader and lawgiver. the earth was passing through physical Mr. Spencer has never shrunk from con­ and chemical conditions which it can troversy, but he has not forsaken the no more see again than a man can study for the arena, and hence his recall his infancy, I should expect to be I influence, great and abiding as it is, has a witness of the evolution of living been less direct and personal than that protoplasm from non-living matter. I of his comrade, “ever a fighter,” who, should expect to see it appear under in Browning’s words, “marched breast forms of great simplicity, endowed, like forward.” Maris Place in Nature was existing fungi, with the power of deter­ the first of a series of deliverances upon mining the formation of new protoplasm the most serious questions that can from such matters as ammonium carbo­ occupy the mind ; and its successors, nates, oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and the brilliant monograph on Hume, pub­ earthy phosphates, and water, without lished in 1879, and the Romanes the aid of light. That is the expectation Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, de­ to which analogical reasoning leads me; livered at Oxford 18th May, 1893, are but I beg you once more to recollect but expansions of the thesis laid down that I have no right to call my opinion in that wonderful little volume; won­ anything but an act of philosophical derful in the prevision which fills it, faith.” and . in the justification which it has Huxley was the Apostle Paul of the received fro'm all subsequent research, Darwinian movement, and one main notably in psychology. result of his active propagandism was If the propositions therein maintained to so effectively prepare the way for the are unshaken, then there is no possible reception of the profounder issues in­ reconciliation between Evolution and volved in the theory of the origin of Theology, and all the smooth sayings species that the publication of Darwin’s in attempted harmonies between the Descent of Man in 1871 created mild two, of which Professor Drummond’s excitement. And the weight of his Ascent of Man is a type, and in support is the greater because he never speeches at Church Congresses of which �93 that delivered by Archdeacon Wilson (seep. 71) is a type, do but hypnotise the “ light half-believers of our casual creeds.” To some there are “signs of the times ” which point to approaching acquiescence in the sentiment of Ovid, paralleled by a famous passage in Gibbon, that “ the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly.” It looks like the prelude to surrender of what is the cardinal dogma of Chris­ tianity when we read in the Arch­ deacon’s address that “ the theory of Evolution is indeed fatal to certain yz/«57-rnythological doctrines of the Atonement which once prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit.” For those doctrines, as the venerable apolo­ gist may learn from the evidence in Frazer’s Golden Bough (chap. iii. passim), are wholly mythological, because bar­ baric. But, in truth, there is not a dogma of Christendom, not a founda­ tion on which the dogma rests, that Evolution does not traverse. The Church of England' adopts, “ as tho­ roughly to be received and believed,” the three ancient creeds, known as the Apostles’, the Athanasian, and the Nicene. There is not a sentence in any One of these which finds confirmation; and only a sentence or two that find neither confirmation nor contradiction, in Evolution. The question, on which reams of paper have been wasted, lies in a nut­ shell. The statements in the Creeds profess to have warrant in the direct words of the Bible; or in inferences drawn from those words, as defined by the Councils of the Church. The decisions of these Councils represent the opinion of the majority of fallible men composing those assemblies, and no number of fallible parts can make an infallible whole. As Selden quaintly puts it {Table Talk, xxx. “Councils”), “ they talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is president of their General Councils, when the truth is the odd man is still the Holy Ghost.” With this same “odd man” rested the decision as to what books should be in­ cluded or excluded from the collection on which the Church bases its authority and formulates its creeds. So, in the last result, both sets of questions are settled by a human tribunal employing a circular argument. But, dismissing this for the moment, let us see to what issues the controversy is narrowred, to quote Huxley’s words (written in 1871), by “ the spontaneous retreat of the enemy from nine-tenths of the territory which he occupied ten years ago.” The battle has no longer to be fought over the question of the fundamental identity of the physical structure of man and of the anthropoid apes. The most enlightened Protestant divines accept this as proven, and not a few Catholic divines are adopting an attitude towards it which is only the prelude to surrender. Matters must have moved apace in the Church which Huxley, backed by history, describes as “ that vigorous and con­ sistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and social life of mankind,” to permit the Roman Catholic Professor of Physics in the University of Notre Dame, America, to parley as follows :— “Granting that future researches in palaeontology, anthropology, and biology, shall demonstrate beyond doubt thaw man is genetically related to the inferior] animals, and we have seen how far scien-| tists are from such a demonstration (?), there will not be, even in such an im­ probable event, the slightest ground for imagining that then, at last, the conclu-J sions of science are hopelessly at variance] with the declarations of the sacred text, or the authorised teachings of the Church of Christ. All that would logically! follow from the demonstration of thei animal origin of man would be a modi1! fication of the traditional view regarding! the origin of the body of our first ancestor. We should be obliged to revise the interpretation that has usually been given to the words of Scripturd which refer to the formation of Adam’s �94 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION body, and read these words in the sense which Evolution demands, a sense which, as we have seen, may be attributed to the words of the inspired record, without either distorting the meaning of terms, or in any way doing violence to the text ” {Evolution and Dogma, by the Reverend J. A. Zahm, Ph.D., C.S.C., pp. 364, 365). Upon this suggested revision of writ­ ings which are claimed as forming part of a divine revelation, one of the highest authorities, Francisco Suarez, thus refers, in his Tractatus de Opere sex Dierum, to the elastic interpretation given in his time to the “ days ” in the first chapter of Genesis. “It is not probable that God, in inspiring Moses to write a history of the Creation, which was to be believed by ordinary people, would have made him use language the true meaning of which it was hard to discover, and still harder to believe.” Three centuries have passed since these wise words were penned, and the reproof which they convey is as much needed now as then. In near connection with the question of man’s origin is that of his antiquity. The existence of his remains, rare as they are everywhere in deposits older than the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch, is not proven. This applies to the remarkable fragments found by Dr. Dubois in Java, the chaiacter of which, in the judgment of several palaeontologists, indicates the nearest approach between man and ape hitherto discovered. But the evidence of the physical relation of these two being conclusive, the exact place of man in the. earth’s time-record is rendered of subordinate importance. The theologians have come to their last ditch in contesting that the mental differences between man and the lower animals are fundamental, being differences of kind, and therefore that no gradual process from the mental faculties of the one to those of the other has taken place. This struggle against the application of the theory of Evolution to man’s intel­ lectual and spiritual nature will be long and stubborn. It is a matter of life and death to the theologian to show that he has in revelation, and in the world-wide belief of mankind in spiritual existences without, and in a spirit or soul within, evidence of the supernatural. The evolutionist has no such corresponding deep concern. When the argument against him is adduced from the Bible, he . can only challenge the grounds on which that book is cited as divine authority, or as an authority at all. Granting, for the sake of argument, that a revelation has been made, the writings purporting to contain it must comply with the twofold condition attaching to it—namely, that it makes known matters which the human mind could not, unaided, have found out; and that it embodies those matters in language as to the meaning of which there can be no doubt whatever. If there be any sacred books which comply with these conditions, they have yet to be dis­ covered. When the argument against the evolu­ tionist is drawn from human testimony, he does not dispute the existence of the belief in a soul and in all the accompany­ ing apparatus of the supernatural; but he calls in the anthropologist to explain how these arose in the barbaric mind. Meanwhile, let us summarise the evidence which points to the psychical unity between man and the lower life­ forms. As stated on p. 80, Mr. Herbert Spencer traces the gradual evolution of consciousness from “the blurred, inde­ terminate feeling which responds to a single nerve pulsation or shock.” There is no trace of a nervous system in the simplest organisms, but this counts for little, because there are also no traces of a mouth, or a stomach, or limbs. In these seemingly structureless creatures every part does everything. The amoeba eats and drinks, digests and excretes, manifests “irritability”—that is, responds to the various stimuli of its surroundings, and multiplies, without possessing special organs for these various functions. Divi­ sion of labour arises at a slightly higher stage, when rudimentary organs appear? �MODERN EVOLUTION the development of function and organ going on simultaneously. Speaking broadly, the functions of living things are threefold: they feed; they reproduce; they respond to their “environment,” and it is this last-named function—communication with surround­ ings—which is the special work of the nervous system. It was an old Greek maxim that “a man may once say a thing as he would have said it: he can­ not say it twice.” This is the warrant for transferring a few sentences on the origin of the nerves from my Story of Creation. They are but a meagre abstract of Mr. Spencer’s long but luminous exposition of the subject “As every part of an organism is made up of cells, and as the functions govern the form of the cells, the origin of nerves must be due to a modification in cell shape and arrangement, whereby certain tracts or fibres of communication between the body and its surroundings are estab­ lished.” “ But what excited that modification ? The all-surrounding medium, without which no life had been, which deter­ mined its limits, and touches it at every point with its throbs and vibrations. In the beginnings of a primitive layer or skin manifested by creatures a stage above the lowest, unlikenesses would arise, and certain parts, by reason of their finer structure, would be the more readily stimulated by, and the more quickly responsive to, the ceaseless action of the surroundings, the result being that an extra sensitiveness along the lines of least resistance would be set up in those more delicate parts. These, developing, like all things else, by use, would become more and more the selected paths of the impulses, lead­ ing, as the molecular waves thrilled them, to structural changes or modification into nerve-cells, and nerve-fibres, of increasing complexity as we ascend the scale of life. The entire nervous system, with its connections; the brain and all the subtle mechanism with which it controls 95 the body ; the organs of the senses ; alike begin as sacs formed by infoldings of the primitive outer skin.” Biologists are agreed that a certain stage in the organisation of the nervous system—the germs of which, we saw, are visible in the quivering of an amoeba, and probably in plants as well as animals —must be reached before consciousness is manifest. Obscurity still hangs round the stage at which mere irritability passes into sensibility, but so long as the continuity of development is clear, the gradations are of lesser importance. And, for the present purpose, there is no need to descend far in the life-scale; if the psychical connection between man and the mammals immediately beneath him is proven, the connection of the mammals with the lowest invertebrate may be assumed as also established. Speaking only of vertebrates, the brain being, whether in fish or man, the organ of mental phenomena, how far does its structure support or destroy the theory of mental continuity ? In Maris Plate in Nature, and its invaluable supplement, the second part of the monograph on Hume, this subject is expounded by Huxley with his usual clearness. In the older book he traces the gradual modifi» cation of brain in the series of backboned animals. He points out that the brain of a fish is very small compared with the spinal cord into which it is continued, that in reptiles the mass of brain, rela­ tively to the spinal cord, is larger, and still larger in birds, until among the lowest mammals, as the opossums and kangaroos, the brain is so increased in proportion as to be extremely different from that of fish, bird, or reptile. Between these marsupials and the high­ est or placental mammals there occurs “the greatest leap anywhere made by Nature in her brain work.” Then follows this important statement in favour of continuity :— “As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and �96 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a rodent to brains little lower than that of man.” After giving technical descriptions in proof of this, and laying special stress on the presence of the structure known as the “ hippocampus minor ” in the brain of man as well as of the ape—in the denial of which Owen cut such a sorry figure— Huxley adds :— “ So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, it is clear that man differs less from the chimpanzee or the orang than these do even from the monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the chimpanzee and of man is almost insignificant when compared with that between the chimpanzee brain and that of a lemur........ Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chim­ panzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes. But in enunciating this important truth I must guard myself against a form of misunderstanding which is very preva­ lent....... that the structural differences between man and even the highest apes are small and insignificant. Let me then distinctly assert, on the contrary, that they are great and significant; that every bone of a gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished from the corre­ sponding bone of a man; and that in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link bridges over the gap between Homo and Troglodytes. It would be no less wrong than absurd to deny the existence of this chasm; but it is at least equally wrong and absurd to exaggerate its magnitude, and, resting on the admitted fact of its existence, to refuse to inquire whether it is wide or narrow. Remember, if you will, that there is no existing link between mar. ( and the gorilla, but do not forget that ! there is a no less sharp line of demarca­ tion, a no less complete absence of any traditional form, between the gorilla and the orang, or the orang and the gibbon.” The brains of man and ape being fundamentally the same in structure, it follows that the functions which they perform are fundamentally the same. The large array of facts mustered by a series of careful observers proves how futile is the argument which, in his pride of birth, man advances against psychical continuity. Vain is the search after boundary lines between reflex action and instinct, and between instinct and reason. Barriers there are between man and brute, for articulate speech and the consequent power to transmit experiences has set up these, and they remain im­ passable. “The potentialities of lan­ guage, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentialities of writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw, and in the mimetic tendency which we know was gratified by drawing as far back as the days of Quaternary man ” (Huxley’s Essays on Controverted Questions, p. 47). But these specially human characteristics are no sufficing warrant for denying that the sensations, emotions, thoughts, and volitions of man vary in kind from those of the lower creation. “ The essential resem­ blances in all points of structure and function, so far as they can be studied, between the nervous system of man and that of the dog, leave no reasonable doubt that the processes which go on in the one are just like those which take place in the other. In the dog there can be no doubt that the nervous matter which lies between the retina and the muscles undergoes a series of changes, precisely analogous to those which, in the man, give rise to sensa­ tion, a train of thought, and volition.” This passage occurs in Huxley’s “ Reply to Mr. Darwin’s Critics,” which appeared in the Contemporary Review, 1871, and �MODERN EVOLUTION it may be supplemented by a quotation from the chapter on “ The Mental Phenomena of Animals” in his Hume: “ It seems hard to assign any good reason for denying to the higher animals any mental state or process in which the employment of the vocal or visual Symbols of which language is com­ posed is not involved; and comparative psychology confirms the position in relation to the rest of the animal world assigned to man by comparative anatomy. As comparative anatomy is easily able to show that, physically, man is but the last term of a long series of forms, which lead, by slow gradations, from the highest mammal to the almost formless speck of living protoplasm, which lies on the shadowy boundary between animal and vegetable life; so, Comparative psychology, though but a young science, and far short of her elder sister’s growth, points to the same conclusion.” Within recent years the psychologists are doing remarkable work in attacking the problem of the mechanics of mental operations, and already in Europe and America some thirty laboratories have been started for experimental work. ¡The subject is somewhat abstruse for detailed reference here, and it must suffice to say that the psychologist, beginning with observations upon him­ self—measuring, for example, “ the degree of sensibility of his own eye to luminous irritations, or of his own skin to pricking—passes on to like inquiry into the numerical relations between the ‘energy of the stimuli of light, sound, and so forth, and the energy of the sen­ sations which they arouse in the nerve­ channels.” An excellent summary, with references to the newest authorities on the subject, is given by Prince Kropotkin in the Nineteenth Century of August, 1896. All this, to the superficial onlooker, seems rank materialism. But we cannot think without a brain, any more than we can see without eyes ; and any inquiry into the operations of the organ of thought must run on the same lines as inquiry into the operations of any other ' organ of the body. And the inquiry leaves us at the point whence we began in so far as any light is thrown on the connection between the molecular vibra­ tions in nerve-tissue and the mental processes of which they are the indis­ pensable accompaniment. Changes take place in some of the thousands of millions of brain-cells in every thought that we think, and in every emotion that we feel; but the nexus remains an impenetrable mystery. Nevertheless, if we may not say that the brain secretes thought as we say that the liver secretes bile, we may also not say that the mind is detachable from the nervous system, and that it is an entity inde­ pendent of it. Were it this, not only would it stand outside the ordinary con­ ditions of development, but it would also maintain the equilibrium which a dose of narcotics or of alcohol, or which starvation and gorging, alike rapidly upset. In his posthumous essay On the Immortality of the Soul, Hume says : “ Matter and spirit are at bottom equally unknown, and we cannot determine what qualities inhere in the one or in the other.” That is the conclusion to-which the wisest come. And in the ultimate correlation of the physical and psychical lies the hope of arrival at that terminus of unity which was the dream of the ancient Greeks, and to which all inquiry makes approach. How, in these matters, philosophy is at one is again seen in Huxley’s admission that “ in respect of the great problems of philosophy the post-Darwinian generation is, in one sense, exactly where the pre-Darwinian generations were. They remain insoluble. But the present generation has the advantage of being better provided with the means of freeing itself from the tyranny of certain sham solutions.” Science explains, and, in exp aining, dissipates, the pseudo-mysteries by which man, in his myth-making stage, when conception of the order of the universe H �98 PIONEERS OE EVOLUTION was yet unborn, accounted for every­ thing. But she may borrow the Apostle’s words, “ Behold ! .1 show you a mystery,” and give to them a profounder meaning as she confesses that the origin and ultimate destiny of matter and motion, the causes which determine the be­ haviour of atoms—whether they are arranged in the lovely and varying forms which mark their crystals, or whether they are quivering with the life which is common to the amoeba and the man— the conversion of the inorganic into the organic by the green plant, and the rela­ tion between nerve-changes and con­ sciousness, are all impenetrable mysteries. In his speech on the commemoration of the jubilee of his Professorship in the University of Glasgow in 1895 Lord Kelvin said : “ I know no more of electric and magnetic force, or of the relation between ether, electricity, and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity, than I knew and tried to teach my students of natural philosophy fifty years ago, in my first session as professor.” This recognition of limitations will content those who seek not “after a sign.” For others, that search will con­ tinue to have encouragement, not only from the theologian, but from the pseudo-scientific who have travelled some distance with the Pioneers of Evolution, but who refuse to follow them further. In each of these there is present the “ theological bias ” whose varied forms are skilfully analysed by Mr. Spencer in his chapter under that heading in the Study of Sociology. This explains the attitude of various groups which are severally represented by the late Mr. St. George Mivart and the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter; by Professor Sir George G. Stokes and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The first-named is a Roman Catholic; the second was a Unitarian; the third is an orthodox Churchman; and the fourth, as already seen, is a Spiritualist. In his Genesis of Species Mr. Mivart contended that “ man’s body was evolved from pre-existing material (symbolised by the term ‘dust of the earth’), and was therefore only deriva­ tively created-—?>., by the operation of secondary laws,” but that “ his soul, on the other hand, was created in quite a different way....... by the direct action of the Almighty (symbolised by the term ‘breathing’)” (p. 325). In his Mental Physiology Dr. Car­ penter postulates an Ego or Will, which presides over, without sharing in, the causally determined action of the other mental functions and their corre­ lated bodily processes; “an entity which does not depend for its existence on any play of physical or vital forces, but which makes these forces subservient to its determinations” (p. 27). Professor Mivart actually cites St. Augustine and Cardinal Newman as authorities in support of his theory of the special creation of the soul. He might with equal effect have subpoenaed Dr. Joseph Parker or General Booth as authorities. Dr. Carpenter argued as became a good Unitarian. In his Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, Professor Stokes asserts, drawing “ on sources of informa­ tion which lie beyond man’s natural powers in other words, appealing to the Bible—that God made man immortal and upright, and endowed him with freedom of the will. As, without the exercise of this, man would have been as a mere automaton, he was exposed to the temptation of the devil, and fell. Thereby he became “ subject to death like the lower animals,” and by the “natural effect of heredity” transmitted the taint of sin to his offspring. The eternal life thus forfeited was restored by the voluntary sacrifice of Christ, but can be secured only to those who have faith in him. This doctrine, which is no novel one, is known as “conditional immortality.” Professor Stokes attaches “no value to the belief in a-future life by metaphysical arguments founded on the supposed nature of the soul itself,” and he admits that “ the purely psychic theory which would discard the body altogether in regard to the process of thought is beset by very great difficulties.” �MODERN EVOLUTION So he once more has recourse to “sources of information which lie beyond man’s natural powers.” Following up certain distinctions between “soul’’and “spirit” drawn by the Apostle Paul in his tripar­ tite division of man, Professor Stokes, somewhat in keeping with Dr. Carpenter, assumes an “ ego, which, on the one hand, is not to be identified with thought, which may exist while thought is in abeyance, and which may, with the future body of which the Christian religion speaks, be the medium of continuity of thought........ What the nature of this body might be we do not know; but we are pretty distinctly informed that it would be something Very different from that of our present body, very different in its properties and functions, and yet no less our qwn than our present body.” “Words, words, words,” as Hamlet says. Reference has been made in some fulness to Mr. Wallace’s limitations of the theory of natural selection in the case of man’s mental faculties. We must now pursue this somewhat in detail, reminding the reader of Mr. Wallace’s admission that, “provisionally, the laws of variation and natural selection ....... may have brought about, first, that perfection of bodily structure in which man is so far above all other animals, and, in co-ordination with it, the larger and more developed brain by means of which he has been able to subject the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms to his service.” But, although Mr. Wallace rejects the theory of man’s Special creation as “being entirely un­ supported by facts, as well as in the highest degree improbable,” he contends that it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature, even though deve­ loped pari passu with his physical Structure, ’has been developed by the same agencies.” Then, by the introduc­ tion of a physical analogy which is no analogy at all, he suggests that the agent by which man was upraised into a king­ dom apart bears like relation to natural selection as the glacial epoch bears to 99 the ordinary agents of denudation and other changes in producing new effects which, though continuous with preceding effects, were not due to the same causes. Applying this “argument” (drawn from natural causes), as Mr. Wallace names it, “ to the case of man’s intellec­ tual and moral nature,” he contends that such special faculties as the mathemati­ cal, musical, and artistic (is this faculty to be denied the nest-decorating bower bird?), and the high moral qualities which have given the martyr his con­ stancy, the patriot his devotion, and the philanthropist his unselfishness, are due to a “ spiritual essence or nature, super­ added to the animal nature of man.” We are not told at what stage in man’s development this was inserted; whether, once and for all, in “primitive” man, with potentiality of transmission through paleeolithic folk to all succeeding genera­ tions ; or whether there is special infu­ sion of a “ spiritual essence ” into every human being at birth. Any perplexity that might arise at the line thus taken by Mr. Wallace vanishes before the fact, already enlarged upon, that the author of the Malay Archipelago and Island Life has written a book on Miracles and Modern Spiritualism in defence of both. The explanation lies in that duality of mind which, in one compartment, ranks Mr. Wallace fore­ most among naturalists, and, in the other compartment, places him among the most credulous of Spiritualists. Despite this, Mr. Wallace has claims to a respectful hearing and to serious reply. Fortunately, he would appear to furnish the refutation to his own argu­ ment in the following paragraph from his delightful Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection “ From the time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into operation and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selec­ tion in his physical form and structure. As an animal he would remain almost �loo PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION stationary, the changes in the surround­ ing universe ceasing to produce in him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise on other parts of the organic world. But, from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would beome sub­ ject to those very influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard against adverse circumstances and com­ bine for mutual comfort and protection would be preserved and accumulated ; the better and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental organisa­ tion would occur which has raised the very lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so little from some of them in physical structure), and, in conjunction with scarcely per­ ceptible modifications of form, has developed the wonderful intellect of the European races” (pp. 316, 317, second edition, 1871). This argument has suggestive illustra­ tion in the fifth chapter of the Origin of Species. Mr. Darwin there refers to a remark to the following effect made by Mr. Waterhouse: “ A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner in comparison with the same part in allied species tends to be highly variables This applies only where there is unusual development. “ Thus, the wing of a bat is a most abnormal structure in the class of mammals; but the rule would not apply here, because the whole group of bats possesses wings; it would apply only if some one species had wings developed in a remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus.” And when this exceptional development of any part or organ occurs, we may conclude that the modification has arisen since the period when the several species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus; and this period will seldom be very remote, as species rarely endure for more than one geological period. How completely this applies to man, the latest product of organic evolution. The brain is that part or organ in him which has been developed “ in an extra­ ordinary degree, in comparison with the same part ” in other primates, and which has become highly variable. Whatever may have been the favouring causes w’hich secured his immediate progenitors such modification of brain as advanced him in intelligence over “allied species,” the fact abides that in this lies the explanation of their after-history; the arrest of the one, the unlimited progress of the other. Increasing intelligence at work through vast periods of time originated and developed those social conditions which alone made possible that progress which, in its most advanced degree, but a small proportion of the race has reached. For in this question of mental differences the contrast is not between man and ape, but between man savage and civilised; between the incapacity of the one to count beyond his fingers, and the capacity of the other to calculate an eclipse of the sun or a transit of Venus. It would therefore seem that Mr. Wallace should introduce his “ spiritual essence or nature ” in the intermediate, and not in the initial, stage. As answer to Mr. Wallace’s argument, that in their large and well-developed brains savages “possess an organ quite disproportioned to their requirements,” Huxley cites Wallace’s own remarks in his paper on Instinct in Man and Animals as to the considerable demands made by the needs of the lower races on their observing faculties which call into play no mean exercise of brain function. “Add to this,” Huxley says, “ the knowledge which a savage is obliged to gain of the properties of plants, of the characters and habits of animals, and of the minute indications by which their course is discoverable; consider that even an Australian can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and �TOW E VOL UTLON beautifully balanced spears; that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards ; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master; consider that every time a savage tracks his game he employs a minuteness of observation and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation, and I think one need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains.” ....... But Mr. Wallace’s objection “applies quite as strongly to the lower animals. Surely a wolf must have too much brain, Or else how is it that a dog, with only the same quantity and form of brain, is able to develop such singular intelli­ gence ? The wolf stands to the dog in the same relation as the savage to the man; and therefore, if Mr. Wallace’s doctrine holds good, a higher power must have superintended the breeding up of wolves from some inferior stock, in order to prepare them to become dogs” {Critiques and Addresses, p. 293). After all is said, perhaps the effective refutation of the belief in a spiritual entity superadded in man is found in the explanation of the origin of that belief which anthropology supplies. The theory of the origin and growth of the belief in souls and spiritual beings generally, and in a future life, which has been put into coherent form by Spencer and Tylor, is based upon an enormous mass of evidence gathered by travellers among existing barbaric peoples—evi­ dence agreeing in character with that which results from investigations into beliefs of past races in varying stages of culture. Only brief reference to it here is necessary, but the merest outline suf­ fices to show from what obvious pheno­ mena the conception of a soul was derived—a conception of which all subsequent forms are but elaborated copies. As in other matters, crude analogies have guided the barbaric mind roí in its ideas about spirits and their behaviour. A man falls asleep and dreams certain things; on waking, he believes that these things actually hap­ pened ; and he therefore concludes thatj the dead who came to him or to whomi he went in his dreams are alive; that 1 the friend or foe whom he knows to be far away, but with whom he feasted or fought in dreamland, came to him. He sees another man fall into a swoon or trance that may lay him seemingly life­ less for hours, or even days ; he himself may be attacked by deranging fevers and see visions stranger than those which a ' healthy person sees ; shadows of himself and of objects, both living and not living, follow or precede him, and lengthen or shorten in the withdrawing] or advancing light; the still water throws back images of himself; the hillsides resound with mocking echoes of his words and of sounds around him; and it is these and allied phenomena which have given rise to the notion of “another self,” to use Mr. Spencer’s convenient term, or of a number of selves that are sometimes outside the man and some­ times inside him, as to which the batH baric mind is never sure. Outside him, however, when the man is sleeping, so that he must not be awakened, lest the, “ other self” be hindered from returning; or when he is sick, or in the toils of the medicine-man, who may hold the “ other self ” in his power, as in the curious soul­ trap of the Polynesians—a series of cocoa-nut rings—in which the sorcerer, makes believe to catch and detain the soul of an offender or sick person.« When Dr. Catat and his companions^ MM. Maistre and Foucart, were explor­ ing the “Bara” country on the west coast of Madagascar, the people sud­ denly became hostile. On the previous day the travellers, not without difficulty, had photographed the royal family, and now found themselves accused of taking the souls of the natives with the object of selling them when they returned to France. Denial was of no avail ; following the custom of the Malagasays, �102 PIONEERS OF E VOL UTION they were compelled to catch the souls, which were then put into a basket, and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to their respective owners (Times, 24th March, 1891). Although the difference presented by such phenomena and by death is that it is abiding, while they are temporary, to the barbaric mind the difference is in degree, and not in kind. True, the “other self” has left the body, and will never return to it; but it exists, for it appears in dreams and hallucinations, and therefore is believed to revisit its ancient haunts, as well as to tarry often near the exposed or buried body. The nebulous theories which identified the soul with breath, and shadow, and reflec­ tion, slowly condensed into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions, resulting in the curious amalgam which, in the minds of cultivated persons, whenever they strive to envisage the idea, represents the dis­ embodied soul. Therefore, in vain may we seek for points of difference in our comparison of primitive ideas of the origin and nature of the soul with the later ideas. The copious literature to which these have given birth is represented in the bibliography appended to Mr. Alger’s work on Theories of a Future Life, by 4,977 books, exclusive of many pub­ lished since his list was compiled. Save in refinement of detail such as a higher culture secures, what is there to choose between the four souls of the Hidatsa Indians, the two souls of the Gold Coast natives, and the tripartite division of man by Rabbis, Platonists, and Paulinists, which are but the savage other-self “ writ large ” ? Their common source is in man’s general animistic interpretation of nature, which is a ‘vera causa, super­ seding the need for the assumptions of which Mr. Wallace’s is a type. As an excellent illustration of what is meant by animism, we may cite what Mr. Everard im Thurn has to say about the Indians of Guiana, who are, presum­ ably, a good many steps removed from so-called “ primitive ” man. “ The Indian does not see any sharp line of distinction such as we see between man and other animals, between one kind of animal and another, or between animals—man included—and inanimate objects. On the contrary, to the Indian all objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident of bodily form. Every object in the whole world is . a being, consisting of a body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no respect except that of bodily form, and in the greater or lesser degree of brute power and brute cunning conse­ quent on the difference of bodily form and bodily habits. Our next step, therefore, is to note that animals, other than men, and even inanimate objects, have spirits which differ not at all in kind from those of men.” The importance of the evidence gathered by anthropology in support of man’s inclusion in the general theory of evolution is ever becoming more manifest. For it has brought witness to continuity in organic development at the point where a break has been assumed, and driven home the fact that, if Evolu­ tion operates anywhere, it operates every­ where. And operates, too, in such a way that every part co-operates in the discharge of a universal process. Hence it meets the divisions which mark oppo­ sition to it by the transcendent power of unity. Until the past half-century man excepted himself, save in crude and superficial fashion, from that investiga­ tion which, for long periods, he has made into the earth beneath 'him and the heavens above him. This tardy inquiry into the history of his own kind, and its place in the order and succession of life, as well as its relation to the lower animals, between whom and itself, as has been shown, the barbaric mind sees much in common, is due, so far as Christendom is concerned (and the like cause applies, mutatis mutandis, in non­ Christian civilised communities), to the �MODERN EVOLUTION subjection of the intellect to preconceived theories based on the authority accorded to ancient legends about man. These legends, invested with the sanctity with which time endows the past, finally became integral parts of sacred litera­ tures, to question which was as super­ fluous as it was impious. Thus it has come to pass that the only being compe­ tent to inquire into his own antecedents has looked at his history through the dis­ torting prism of a mythopceic past! Perhaps, in the long run, the gain has exceeded the loss. For, in the prece­ dence of study of other sciences more remote from man’s “ business and bosom,” there has been rendered possible a more dispassionate treatment of matters charged with profounder issues. Since the Church, however she may conveni­ ently ignore the fact as concession after Concession is wrung from her, has never slackened in jealousy of the advance of secular knowledge, it was well for human progress that those subjects of inquiry which affected orthodox views only indirectly were first prosecuted. The brilliant discoveries in astronomy, to which the Copernican theory gave impetus, although they displaced the earth from its assumed supremacy among the bodies in space, did not apparently affect the doctrine of the supremacy of man as the creature of Divine intervention, as the centre for whom the scheme of redemption had been formulated “ in the counsels of the Trinity,” and the tragedy of the self-sacrifice of God the Son enacted on earth. The surrender Or negation of any fundamental dogma of Christian theology was not involved in the abandonment of the statement in the Bible as to the dominant position of the earth in relation to the sun and Other self-luminous stars. To our own tíme the increase of knowledge concern­ ing the myriads of sidereal systems which revolve through space is not held to be destructive of those dogmas, but held, rather, to supply material for speculation as to the probable extension of Divine paternal government throughout the 103 universe. And, although, as coming nearer home, with consequent greater chance of intrusion of elements of friction, the like applies to the discoveries of geology. Apart from intellectual apathy, which explains much, the impact of these discoveries on traditional beliefs was softened by the buffers which a moderating spirit of criticism interposed in the shape of superficial “ reconciliations ” emptying the old cos­ mogony of all its poetry, and therefore of its value as a key to primitive ideas, and converting it into bastard science. Thus a temporary, because artificial, unity was set up. But with the evidence supplied by study of the ancient life whose remains are imbedded in the fossil-yielding strata, that unity is shivered. In a scripture that “ cannot be brokenn there was read the story of conflict and death aeons before man appeared. Between this record and that which spoke of pain and death as the conse­ quences of man’s disobedience to the frivolous prohibition of an anthropo­ morphic God there is no possible recon­ ciliation. To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was added evidence from old river­ gravels and limestone caverns. The relics extracted from the stalagmitic deposits in Kent’s Hole, near Torquay, had lain unheeded for some years save as “curios,” when M. Boucher de Perthes saw in the worked flints of & somewhat rougher type, which he found mingled with the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals, in the | “ drift ” or gravel-pits of Abbeville, in I Picardy, the proofs of man’s primitive I savagery, so far as Western Europe was 1 concerned. The presence of these ' rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de Perthes in 1839, but he could i not persuade savants to admit that human hands had shaped them, until 1 these doubting Thomases saw for them­ selves like implements in situ at a depth of seventeen feet from the original surface of the ground. That was in 1858, a �io4 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION year before the publication of the Origin mode of progress no civilised people has of Species. Similar materials have been been the exception, as, notably in the case unearthed from every part of the globe of the Hebrews, was once thought—“ the habitable once or inhabitable now. They correspondence between the old Israelitic confirm the speculations of Lucretius as and other archaic forms of theology to a universal makeshift with stone, bone, extending to details.” horn, and suchlike accessible or pliable While, therefore, the discoveries of substances during the ages that preceded astronomers and geologists have been the discovery of metals. Therefore the disintegrating agencies upon old beliefs, existence of a Stone Age at one period the discoveries classed under the general or another, where now an Age of Iron term Anthropological are acting as more (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, powerful solvents on every opinion of is an established canon of archaeological the past. Showing on what mythical science. From this follows the inference foundation the story of the fall of man that man’s primitive condition was that rests, Anthropology has utterly demo­ which corresponds to the lowest type lished the raison d’etre of the doctrine extant, the Australian and Papuan ; that of his redemption—-the keystone of the the farther back inquiry is pushed such fabric. It has penetrated the mists of culture as exists is found to have been antiquity, and traced the myth of a for­ preceded by barbarism; and that the feited Paradise, of the Creation, the savage races of to-day represent, not a Deluge, and other legends, to their degradation to which man, as the result birthplaces in thé valley of the Euphrates of a fall from primeval purity and Eden- or the uplands of Persia; legends whose like ease has sunk, but a condition out earliest inscribed records are on Accadian of which all races above the savage have tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. emerged. It has, in the spirit of the commended While Prehistoric Archaeology, with Bereans, “ searched ” those and other its enormous mass of material remains scriptures, finding therein legends of gathered from “ dens and caves of the founders of ancient faiths cognate to earth,” from primitive workshops, from those which in the course of the rude tombs and temples, thus adds its centuries gathered round Jesus of Naza­ testimony to the “great cloud of wit­ reth ; it has collated the rites and cere­ nesses,” immaterial remains, potent as monies of many a barbaric theology embodying the thought of man, are with those of old-world religions—Brahbrought by the twin sciences of Com­ manic, Buddhistic, Christian—and found parative Mythology and Folk-lore, and only such differences between them as Comparative Theology—-remains of para­ are referable to the higher or the lower mount value, because existing to this culture. For the'history of superstitions day in hitherto unsuspected form, as is included in the history of beliefs ; the survivals in beliefs and rites and customs. superstitions being the germ-plasm of Readers of Tylor’s Primitive Culture, which all beliefs above the lowest are with its wealth of facts and their signi­ the modified products. Belief incarnates ficance, and of Lyall’s Asiatic Studies, in word or act. In the one we have the wherein is described the making of charm, the invocation, and the dogma; myths to this day in the heart of India, in the other the ritual and ceremony. need not be told how the slow zigzag “A ritual system,” Professor Robertson advance of man in material things has Smith remarks, “must always, remain its parallel in the stages of his intellectual materialistic, even if its materialism is and spiritual advance all the world over ; disguised under the cloak of mysticism.” from the lower animism to the higher And it is with the incarnated ideas, un­ conception of deity; from bewildering influenced by the particular creed in guesses to assuring certainties. To this connection with which it finds them, �MODERN E VOLUTION that Anthropology deals. Its method is that of biology. Without bias, without assumptions of relative truth or falsity, the Anthropologist searches into origins, traces variations, compares and classities, and relates the several families to one ordinal group. He must be what was said of Dante, “a theologian to whom no dogma is foreign.” Unfortunately, this method, whose application to the physical sciences is unchallenged, is, when applied to beliefs, regarded as one of attack, instead of being one of expla­ nation. But this should not deter; and if in analysing a belief we kill a supersti­ tion, this does but show what mortality lay at its core. For error cannot survive dissection. Moreover, as John Morley puts it, “to tamper with veracity is to tamper with the vital force of human' progress.” Therefore, delivering im­ partial judgment, the verdict of Anthro­ pology upon the whole matter is that the claims of Christian theologians to a special and divine origin of their religion are refuted by the accordant evidence of the latest utterances of a science whose main concern is with the origin, nature, and destiny of man. The extension of the comparative method to the various products of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature is the logical sequence to the adoption of that method throughout every department of the universe. Of course it starts with the assumption of differences in things, else it would be superfluous. But it equally starts with the assumption of resemblances, and in every case it has brought out the fact that the differences are superficial, and that the resemblances are fundamental. All this bears closely on Huxley’s work. The impulse thereto has come largely from the evidence focussed in Marls Place in Nature, evidence of which the material of the writings of his later years is the expansion. The cultivation of intellect and character had always been a favourite theme with him, and the interest was widened when the passing of Mr. Forster’s Elementary 105 Education Act in 1870 brought the problem of popular culture to the front. The wave of enthusiasm carried a group of distinguished liberal candidates to the polls, and Huxley was elected a member of the School Board for London. Then, although in not so acute a form as now, the religious difficulty was the sole cause of any serious division, and Huxley’s attitude therein puzzled a good many people because he advocated the retention of the Bible in the schools. Those who should have known him better thought that he was (to quote from one of his letters to the writer) “a hypocrite, or simply a fool.” “But,” he adds, “ my meaning was that the mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them, nor shut out from the perception of its place in the whole past history of civilised mankind.” He lamented, as every thoughtful person must lament, the decay of Bible reading in this generation, while, at the same time, he advocated the more strenuously its detachment from the glosses and theological inferences which do irrepar­ able injury to a literature whose value cannot be overrated. For Huxley was well read in history, and, therefore, he would not trust the clergy as interpreters of the Bible. After repeating in the Prologue to his Essays on Controverted Questions what he had said about the book in his article on the School Boards in Critiques and Addresses* he adds : “ I laid stress on the the neces­ sity of placing such instruction in lay hands ; in the hope and belief that it would thus gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the perennially interesting, historical, literary, and ethical contents would come more and more into view.” Subsequent events have justified neither the hope nor the belief. Had Huxley lived to see that all the sectaries, while quarrelling as to the particular dogmas which may be deduced from �io6 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION the Bible, agree in refusing to use it the writer, wherein Huxley refers to his other than as an instrument for the retirement from official life, he says :— teaching of dogma, he would probably I so ill that I thought with Hamlet, the have come to see that the only solu­ rest wassilence.” But my wiry constitution“ has is tion in the interests of the young is its unexpectedly weathered the storm, and I have exclusion from the schools. Never has every reason to believe that with renunciation of any collection of writings, whose mis­ the devil and all his works (z>., public speaking, dining, and being etc. my cellaneous, unequal, and often discon­ be unimpaired for a dined,spell )yet. faculties may good And whether nected character is obscured by the my lease is long or short, I mean to devote common title “ Bible ” which covers them to the work I began in the paper on the them, had such need for deliverance “ Evolution of Theology.” from the so-called “ believers ” in it. Its That essay was first published in two value is only to be realised in the degree sections in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, that theories of its inspiration are aban­ and was the sequel to the eighth chapter doned. Then only is it possible to treat of his Hume. The Romanes Lecture it like any other literature of the kind; supplemented the last chapter of that to discriminate between the coarse and book. All these are accessible enough barbaric features which evidence the to render superfluous any abstract of humanness of its origin, and the loftier their contents. But the tribute due to features of its later portions which also David Hume, who may well-nigh claim evidence how it falls into line with other place among the few but fit company of witnesses of man’s gradual ethical and pioneers, warrants reference to his anti­ spiritual development. cipation of accepted theories of the Huxley’s breadth of view, his sym­ origin of belief in spiritual beings in pathy with every branch of culture, his his Natural History of Religion, pub­ advocacy of literary in unison with lished in 1757. He says: “There is scientific training, fitted him supremely an universal tendency among mankind for the work of the School Board; but to conceive all beings like themselves, its demands were too severe on a man and to transfer to every object those never physically strong, and he was qualities with which they are familiarly forced to resign. However, he was acquainted, and of which they are inti­ thereby set free for other work, which mately conscious....... The unknown causes could be only effectively done by which continually employ their thought, exchanging the arena for the study. appearing always in the same aspect, are The earliest important outcome of that all apprehended to be of the same kind relief was the monograph on Hume, or species. Nor is it long before we published in 1879, and the latest was ascribe to them thought and reason and the Romanes lecture on Evolution and passion, and sometimes even the limbs Ethics, which was delivered in the Shel- and figures of men, in order to bring donian Theatre at Oxford on the 18th them nearer to a resemblance with our­ May, 1893. Between the two lie a selves.” In his address to the Sorbonne valuable series of papers dealing with on The Successive Advances of the Human the Evolution of Theology and cognate Mind, delivered in 1750, Turgot expresses subjects. In all these we have the the same idea, touching, as John Morley application of the theory of Evolution says in his essay on that statesman, “ the to the explanation of the origin of beliefs root of most of the wrong thinking that and of the basis of morals. To quote has been as a manacle to science.” The foregoing, and passages of a like the saying attributed to Liebnitz, both Spencer and Huxley, and all who follow order, are made by Huxley the text of them, care for “ science only because it his elaborations of the several stages of enables them to speak with authority in theological evolution, the one note of all philosophy and religion.” In a letter to of which is the continuity of belief in �MODERN E VOLUTION 1 ; . ■ ’ supernatural intervention. But more important than the decay of that belief, which is the prelude to decay of belief in deity itself as commonly defined, is the resulting transfer of the foundation of morals-—in other words, of motives to conduct, from a theological to a social basis. Theology is not morality; indeed, it is, too often, immorality. It is con­ cerned with man’s relations to the gods in whom he believes ; while morals are concerned with man’s relations to his fellows. The one looks heavenward, wondering what dues shall be paid the gods to win their smiles or ward off their frowns. In old Rome sanctitas or holiness was, according to Cicero, “ the knowledge of the rites which had 40 be performed.” These done, the gods were expected to do their part. So in new Rome, when the Catholic has attended mass, his share in the contract is ended. Worship and sacri­ fice, as mere acts towards supernatural beings, may be consonant with any number of lapses in conduct. Morality, on the other hand, looks earthward, and is prompted to action solely by what is due from a man to his fellow-men, or from his fellow-men to him. Its founda­ tion, therefore, is not in supernatural beliefs, but in social instincts. All sin is thus resolved into an anti-social act : a wrong done by man to man. This is not merely readjustment ; it is revolution. For it is the rejection of theology with its appeals to human obli­ gation to deity, and to man’s hopes of future reward or fears of future punish­ ment ; and it is the acceptance of wholly secular motives as incentives to right action. Those motives, having their foundation in the physical, mental, and moral results of our deeds, rest on a Stable basis. No longer interlaced with the unstable theological, they neither abide nor perish with it. And one redeeming feature of our time is that the Churches are beginning to see this, and to be affected by it. John Morley caustically remarks that “ the efforts of the heterodox have taught 107 them to be better Christians than they were a hundred years ago.” Certain extremists excepted, they are keeping dogma in the background, and are laying stress on the socialism which it is con­ tended was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. Wisely, if not very consistently, they are seeking alliance with the liberal movements whose aim is the “abolition of privilege.” The liberal theologians, in the face of the varying ethical standards which mark the Old Testa­ ment and the New, no longer insist on the absoluteness of moral codes, and so fall into line with the evolutionist in his theory of their relativeness. For society, in its advance from lower to higher con­ ceptions of duty, completely reverses its ethics, looking back with horror on that which was once permitted and unques­ tioned. It is with this checking of “ the ape and tiger,” and this fostering of the “ angel ” in man, that Huxley dealt in his Romanes Lecture. There was much unintelligent, and some wilful, misunder­ standing of his argument, else a pro­ minent Catholic biologist would hardly have welcomed it as a possible prelude to Huxley’s submission to the Church. Yet the reasoning was clear enough, and in nowise contravened the application of Evolution to morals. Huxley showed that Evolution is both cosmical and ethical. Cosmic Evolution has resulted in the universe with its non-living and living contents, and since, dealing with the conditions which obtain on our planet, there is not sufficient elbow-room or food for all the offspring of living things, the result is a furious struggle in which the strong win and transmit their advantages to their descendants. Nature is wholly selfish ; the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong. But there are limits set to that struggle by man in the substitution, also within limits, of social progress for cosmic progress. In this Ethical Evolution selfishness is so far checked as to permit groups of human beings to live together in amity, recognising certain common �108 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION rights, which restrain the self-regarding the fate of man. Which things are fact impulses. For, in the words of Marcus as well as allegory; and time is on Aurelius, “that which is not good for the side of the bacteria. For as the swarm is not good for the bee ” our life is but a temporary arrest of {Med., vi. 54). Huxley aptly likens this the universal movement towards disso­ counter-process to the action of a lution, so naught in our actions can gardener in dealing with a piece of arrest the destiny of our kind. Huxley waste ground. He stamps out the thus puts it in the concluding sentences weeds, and plants fragrant flowers and of his Preface—written in July, 1894, useful fruits. But he must not relax one year before his death—to the re­ his efforts, otherwise the weeds will issue of Evolution and Ethics:— return, and the untended plants will be “ That man, as a ‘ political animal,’ is choked and perish. So in conduct. susceptible of a vast amount of improve­ For the common weal, in which the ment, by education, by instruction, and unit shares, thus blending the selfish and by the application of his intelligence to the unselfish motives, men check their the adaptation of the conditions of life natural impulses. The emotions and to his higher needs, I entertain not the affections which they share with the slightest doubt. But, so long as he lower social animals, only in higher remains liable to error, intellectual or degree, are co-operative, and largely help moral; so long as he is compelled to be the development of family, tribal, and perpetually on guard ¿gainst the cosmic national life. But once let these be forces, whose ends are not his ends, weakened, and society becomes a bear­ without and within himself; • so long garden. Force being the dominant as he is haunted by inexpugnable factor in life, the struggle for existence memories and hopeless aspirations; so revives in all its primitive violence, and long as the recognition of his intellectual atavism asserts its power. Therefore, limitations forces him to acknowledge although he do the best that in him lies, his incapacity to penetrate the mystery man can only set limits to that struggle, of existence; the prospect of attaining for the ethical process is an integral part untroubled happiness, or of a state of the cosmic powers, “just as the which can, even remotely, deserve the 1 governor ’ in a steam-engine is part of title of perfection, appears to me to be the mechanism of the engine.” As with as misleading an -illusion as ever was society, so with its units : there is no dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. truce in the contest. Dr. Plimmer, an And there have been many of them. eminent bacteriologist, describes to the That which lies before the human race writer the action of a kind of yeast is a constant struggle to maintain and upon a species of Daphnia, or water­ improve, in opposition to the State of flea. Metschnikoff observed that these Nature, the State of Art of an organised yeast-cells, which enter with the animal’s polity; in which, and by which, man food, penetrate the intestines, and get may develop a worthy civilisation, into the tissues. They are there seized capable of maintaining and constantly upon by the leukocytes, which gather improving itself, until the evolution of round the invaders in laager fashion, as our globe shall have entered so far upon if seemingly endowed with conscious­ its downward course that the cosmic ness, so marvellous is the strategy. If process resumes its sway; and, once they win, the Daphnia recovers; if they more, the State of Nature prevails over lose, it dies. “ In a similar manner in the surface of our planet.” ourselves certain leukocytes (phagocytes) But only those of low ideals would accumulate at any point of invasion, and pick up the living bacteria,” and in the seek in this impermanence of things success or failure of their attack lies excuse for inaction; or, worse, for self- �MODERN E VOLUTION indulgence. The world will last a very long time yet, and afford scope for battle against the wrongs done by man to man. Even were it and ourselves to perish to­ morrow, our duty is clear while the chance of doing it may be ours. Clifford —-dead before his prime, before the rich promise of his genius had its full fruitage —speaking of the inevitable end of the earth “ and all the consciousness of men,” reminds us, in his essay on The First and Last Catastrophe, that we are helped in facing the fact “by the words of Spinoza : ‘ The free man thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not of death, but of life.’ ” “ Our interest,” Clifford adds, “ lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us and the brethren who are with us ; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be appreciably affected by our good actions now. Do I seem to say, ‘ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ’ ? Far from it; on the contrary, I say, ‘ Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together.’ ” Evolution and Ethics was Huxley’s last important deliverance, since the completion of his reply to Mr. Balfour’s “ quaintly entitled ” Foundations of Belief was arrested by his death on the 30th June, 1895. In looking through the Collected Essays, which represent his non-technical contributions to knowledge, there may be regret that throughout his life Circumstances were against his doing any piece of long-sustained work, such as that which, for example, the affluence and patience of Darwin permitted him to do. But until Huxley’s later years, and, indeed, through broken health to the end, his work outside official demands had to be done fitfully and piecemeal, or not at all. Notwithstanding this, it has the unity which is inspired by a central idea. The application of the theory of evolution all round imparts a quality of 109 relation to subjects seemingly diverseAnd this comes out clearly and strongly in the more orderly arrangement of the material in the new issue of Collected Essays. These. show what an omnivorous reader he was; how well equipped in classics, theology, and general literature, in addition to subjects distinctly his own. He sympathised with every branch of culture. As contrasted with physical science, he said, “ Nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a very prominent branch of education.” One corner of his library was filled with a strange company of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called “ the condemned cell.” When looking at the “ strange bed­ fellows ” that slept on the shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a style whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seem un­ borrowed ; and he at once named the masculine and pellucid Leviathan of Hobbes. He had the happy faculty of rapidly assimilating what he read; of clearly grasping an opponent’s standpoint; and what is a man’s salvation nowadays, freedom from that curse of specialism which kills all sense of proportion and reduces its slave to the level of the machine-hand that spends his life in making the heads of screws. He believed in “ scepticism as the highest duty, and in blind faith as the one unpardonable sin.” “ And,” he says, “ it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary’ of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates holds them, not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders, but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature—whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to �no PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION experiment and to observation—Nature | Thus have the Pioneers of Evolution, will confirm them. The man of science clear-sighted and sure-footed, led us by has learned to believe in justification, ways undreamed-of at the start to a goal not by faith, but by verification.” There­ undreamed-of by the earliest among fore he nursed no illusions; would not them. To have halted on the route say that he knew when he did not or when the graver difficulties of the road could not know, and, bidding us follow began would have made the journey the evidence whithersoever it leads us, futile, and have left their followers in the remains the surest-footed guide of our wilds. Evolution, applied to everything time. Such leadership is his, since he up to man, but stopping at the stage has gone on “ from strength to strength.” when he appears, would have remained The changes in the attitude of man a fascinating study, but would not have towards momentous questions which new become a guiding philosophy of life. It evidence and the Zeitgeist have effected, is in the extension of its processes as have been approaches to the position explanation of all that appertains to taken by Huxley since he first caught mankind that its abiding value consists. the public ear. His deep religious That extension was inevitable. The old feeling kept him in sympathetic touch theologies of civilised races, useful in with his fellows. Ever present to him their day, because answering, however was “that consciousness of the limita­ imperfectly, to permanent needs of tion of man, that sense of an open human nature, no longer suffice. Their secret which he cannot penetrate, in dogmas are traced as the lineal descen­ which lies the essence of all religion.” dants of barbaric conceptions; their In one of his replies to a prominent ritual . is becoming an archaeological exponent of the Comtian philosophy, curiosity. They have no answer to the that “ incongruous mixture of bad science questions propounded by the growing with eviscerated papistry,” as he calls it, intelligence of our time; neither can Huxley protests against the idea that the they satisfy the emotions which they but teaching of science is wholly negath e. feebly discipline. Their place is being slowly, but surely, and more effectively, I venture, he says, to count it an improbable filled by a theory which, interpreting suggestion that anyone who has graduated in all the “ mighty sum of things,” substitutes the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper clear conceptions of unbroken order and anxieties which cling about them ; who has felt relation between phenomena, in place of the burden of young lives entrusted to his care ; hazy conceptions of intermittent inter­ and has stood alone with his dead before the ferences ; a theory which gives more abyss of the Eternal—has never had a thought beyond negative criticism. than it Tkes away. For if men are deprived of belief in the pseudo-mysteries That is the Agnostic position as he coined in a pre-scientific age, their won­ defined it: an attitude, not a creed j and der is fed, and their inquiry is stimu­ if he refused to affirm, he equally refused lated, by the consciousness of. the to deny. impenetrable mysteries of the Universe. �INDEX Abdera, 14 Abiogenesis, 92 Abraham, 29 Adam, fall of, 49 ; stature of, 50 Advent, the Second, 28, 35 Ægean, the, 10 Agassiz, 71 Air as primary substance, 13 Alexander the Great, 15 Alexandria, the conquest of, 38 ; philoso­ phical schools of, 38 Allegorical method, 37 Allen, Grant, 9, 52, 73 Amazons, river, 61 America, discovery of, 41 Amoeba, the, 94 Anatomy, comparative, 96 ----- human, 43 Anaxagoras, 14 Anaximander, 11, 16 Ancestor-worship, 35 Angels, belief in, 35 Animism, 36, 46, 102, 106 Anthropology and belief in the soul, 101 ----- and dogmas of the Fall and the Ré­ demption, 103, 104 —— and man’s place in Evolution, 102 Antioch, 27 Ape and man, brain of, 96 —— general relation of, 96 Aquinas, Thomas, 16, 37 Arab conquest, 38 •----- philosophy, 39 Arch-fiend, 29 Aristotle, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 37, 39, 4°, 42> 72 Arnold, Matthew, 13, 90 Ascent of Man, Drummond’s, 92 Asklepios, 19 Astruc, Dr., 48 Athens, 22, intellectual decay in, 38 ------ persecution in, 14 religious revival in, 12, 14 Atomic theory, 14 Atonement, doctrine of the, and Anthro­ pology, 104 Augurs, 20 Augustine, St., 16, 30, 37 Augustus, Cæsar, 25, 27 Aurelius, Marcus, 28, 108 Averroes, 39 Avicenna, 48 Bacon, Lord, 44, 50 Bacon, Roger, 40 Bacteria and leukocytes, 108 Bagehot, Mr., 9 Baghdad, 39 Balfour, A. J., 109 Baptism, origin of rite of, 34 Bates, H. W., 61, 62, 71, 73, 88 Beagle, voyage of the, 59, 60 Benn, A. W., 12, 16 Bible, Dictionary of the, 50 Biology, advance in study of, 50 Black magic, 40 Body and mind, mystery of connection between, 97 Bone, resurrection, 43 Bonnet, Charles, 19 Breathing, symbolism of, 35 Bruno, Giordano, 43 Buddha, 33 Buffon, place of, in theory of Evolution, 51 ----- submission to the Sorbonne, 49 Burnet, Prof., 10, II, 14 Burton’s Anatomy, 31 Butcher, Prof., 10 C2ESALPINO, 43 Canon of the Bible, 31, 42 Carpenter, Dr., 67, 98 Carthage, 38 ----- Council of, 31 Casalis, Mr., 9 Celtic religion, 36 Chaldoea, 10 Chambers, Robert, 54 Chosroes, 38, 39 Christianity and Anthropology, 105 ----- anti-social nature of, 28 ----- causes of success of, 27, 30 ----- opposition to inquiry, 24 ----- origin of, 23 ----- pagan elements in, 31-36 ■----- philosophic elements in, 30, 31 ----- polytheism of, 35 - ---- varying fortunes of, 23 Christians, persecution of, 27 Church Congress and Evolution, 70, 92 Circumnavigation of the globe, 41 Clifford, Prof., 109 Collins, 24 Colophon, 12 Columbus, Christopher, 41 Communion at Hawarden Church, 35 Comtism, no Conduct, bases of, 80, 106 �ÎI2 INDEX Consciousness, evolution of, 80, 95 ----- self-, 80 Conservation of energy, 21, 55, 66, 77 Copernicus, 16, 42, 43 Correlation of forces, 81 Cosmic Evolution, 107 Councils, general, 93 Creation, days of, 48, 49 Credulity of the learned, 66 Creeds, 28, 93 Criticism of religions, features of modern, 24 Cronus, myth of, 11 Cross, relics of the, 36 Crown of thorns, 36 Cuvier, 53, 54, 72 ----- and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, 90 Cybele, 19 Dalton, John, 14, 57 Daphnia, Dr. Plimmer on, 108 Darwin, Charles, 58-61, 69-76 ----- Life and Letters of 58, 69 ----- religious belief of, 75 ----- Erasmus, 16, 51 Days of creation, 48, 49 De Gama, Vasco, 41 Deluge, 49, 50, 104 Demeter, 19, 34 Democritus, 14, 17, 21 Demons, 29, 30, 37, 42 De Perthes, Boucher, 55, 103 De Rerum Natura, 17 Descartes, 43, 44, 91 Descent into Hell, 42 Descent of Man, 73, 75, 92 Development, law of, 81 Devil, 29, 40, 41 De Vinci, Leonardo, 48 Diagoras, 32, 33 Dictionary of the Bible, 50 Dionysus, 34 Dispersion of the Jews, 30, 38 Dogma and Evolution, 92 Driver, Rev. Canon, 29, 50 Dubois, Dr., 94 Duner, Professor, 78 Earth as “ element,” 13 •Earth, Greek notions about the, 11, 12 Education and dogma, 105 Egypt, 10, 11, 38 Eleatic school, 12 Elviri, Synod of, 32 Embryology, 54, 92 Empedocles, 13, 17, 19 Ephesus, 12 Epictetus, 28 Epicurus, 17, 19 Epigenesis, 16 Ethical evolution, 108 Etruscan haruspices, 20 Eve, stature of, 50 Evil eye, 35 Evolution and dogma, 92 •----- cosmic, 107 ----- ethical, 107 ■----- inclusion of man in, 102 ----- inorganic, 76 ----- organic, 85 Evolution and Ethics, Huxley on, 92, 106 Fall, doctrine of the, and anthropology, 103 Fire as primary substance, 13 First Principles, 73, 81 Fiske, Professor, 11 Flint implements, 103 Folk-lore, value of study of, 104 Fontenelle, 9 Fossils, theories about, 49 Galen, 43 Galileo, discoveries and persecution of, 43, 44 Geology, effect of study of, 47 .----- Principles of, 54 Gesner, 43 Gibbon, 30, 31, 36, 93 Gladstone, Mr., 35 Gnosticism, 27 Gods in Rome, 19, 20 G-olden Bough, The, 34, Gospels, origin of, 26 Gosse, P. H., 49 Gower, Dr., 69 Granada, 39 Greece, 10 •----- conquest and intellectual decline of, 17 Greek philosophers, Table of, 22 Greeks, early conception of earth by, II, 12 ----- search of, for the primary substance, 11 Grote, 14 Haeckel, 53, 75 Hallucinations, 67, 68 Hartley, 57 Haruspices, 20 Harvey, William, 16, 44 Heine’s Travel-Pictures, 68 Hellenic Jews, 30, 38 Helmholtz, 57 Henrion, 50 Heraclitus, 12, 13 Herakles, 19 Herodotus, 32 Herschel, Sir William, 45, 77 Hesiod, 12 “ Hippocampus minor,” 96 Hobbes’ Leviathan, 31, 32, 109 Holy Communion, barbaric origin of rite of, 34, 35 Homer, 12, 13, 37 Hooker, Sir Joseph, 63, 71 ----- Sir William, 54 Horace, 33, 37 Huggins, Dr. Wm., 77 Humanity and Evolution, 83 Humboldt, 55, 61 Hume, 46, 82, 106 Hutton, 54 �INDEX Huxley, 44, 69, 71, 86-110 Indigitamenta, 20 Inductive Philosophy, the, 44 Inquisition, the, 43, 44 Instinct, 96 Jonia, 10, 11, 29 Ionian school, 11, 12 Isis, 19, 33 Jerome, St., 17, 49 Jerusalem, early disciples of Jesus at, 26 — fall of, 38 ■ ■ . ... Jesus at, 25 J^us, summary of life of, 25, 26 —■— superstition shared by, 29, 30 Jews, Hellenic, or of the Dispersion, 30, 38 Kant, 45, 76, 85 Kelvin, Lord, 98 Kent’s Hole, 103 Khalifs, 38 Kirchoff, 77 Kropotkin, Prince, 97 Lamarck, 52 Language, 96 La Peyrere, 48 Laplace, 45, 77 Leibnitz, 57, 106 Leo III., 39 L'Etui de Nacre, 26 Leucippus, 14, 17, 21 Leukocytes, 108 Life and Letters, Darwin’s, 38, 69, 7 5 Lightfoot, Dr., 48, 55 Linnaeus, 50 Linnean Society, famous meeting at, 63, 78 Living 'and non-living matter, connection between, 21, 92 Locke, 45 Lodge, Prof. Oliver, 66 Love as an “element,” 14 Lubbock, Sir John, 73 Lucretius, 15, 17-20, 25, 104 Luther, 42 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 20, 23, 104 Lyell, Sir Charles, 54, 60, 71 Madonna, 32 Maine, Sir Henry, 10 Malpighi, 16 Malthus on Population, 52, 60, 63 Man and Evolution, 46, 64, 92, 96, 99 ----- and ape, brain of, 96 ----- and ape, general structure of, 64 ----- antiquity of, 94 «—— inclusion of, in Evolution, 98 -—lower animals and, 92, 96 ----- primitive state of, 104 suckling, period of, 11 Manning, Cardinal, 70 Maris Place in Nature, 72, 73, 90, 92, 105 Marcus Aurelius, 28, 108 Martel, Charles, 38 II3 Martin, R. B., 74 Martyr, Peter, 42 Maskelyne, Mr., 66 Matter, indestructibility of, 21 • ------ living and non-living, 21, 92 ----- - mystery of, 78, 81, 91, 97 Matthew, Patrick, 54, 72 Maudsley, Dr., 69 Messiah, Jewish belief in, 25, 26 Metals, age of, 19, 21, 104 Middleton, Conyers, 31-34 Miletus, 11 Miracles and Modern Spiritualism-, 65, 99 Mithra worship, 25, 28, 36 Mivart, Prof. St. George, 98 Mohammed, 38 Montaigne, 23, 32 Morality, essential nature of, 107 Morals and Evolution, 106 ----- scientific base of, 107 Morley, John, 23, 74, 105, 107 Motion, concept of, 77 ----- -indestructibility of, 21 ----- mystery of, 78, 81, 91, 97 Mysteries, Greek, 27 Mystery of matter, 78, 81, 91, 97 ----- motion, 78, 81, 91, 97 Myth, primitive, features of, 9 Nebula in Andromeda, 77 Nebular theory, 45, 78 Nervous system, disorders of the, 68 ----- - origin of the, 95 New Testament, canon of, 31, 42 ----- origin of, 28 Nicene Creed, 28, 93 Notts of Anaxagoras, 14 Numbers in primitive thought, 12 ----- Pythagorean theory of, 12, 22 Organic Evolution, 85 Origin of Species, 64, 71, 90 • ------ publication of, 69 ----- reception of, 69, 71 Osborn, Professor, 48, 54 Ovid, 93 . . Owen, Sir Richard, attitude of, towards Darwin’s theory, 71, 90 ----- review of the Origin oj Spe .les, Paladino, Eusapia, 66 Palaeontology, 92 Pantheon, Roman, 19, 20 Papacy, origin of the, 31 Paul, St., 27 Pausanias, 13 Pentateuch, 29, 48 Pericles, 14 Persia, intellectual activity in, 39 Petrie, Prof. Flinders, 86 Philo, 31 Philosophy, Synthetic, 78, 83-85 Photography in Science, 77 Physical Basis of Life, Huxley on, 91 Pineal gland, theory of soul in, 43 �114 INDEX Plato, 10, 29, 90 Polytheism, feature of, 27 ------ in Christianity, 35 Pontius Pilate, 26, 27 Preformation theory, 16 Primary substance, 21 ----- search after, 11 Protoplasm, 54 Psychical Research, Society for, 66 Psychology, experimental, 97 ----- Principles of, 80, 81 Ptolemaic System, 16, 42 Pythagoras, 12 Pythagorean theory of numbers, 12, 22 Red 1, experiments of, 91 Reformation non-intellectual, 42 -—-— character of the, 41 Relics, worship of, 35 Rhys, Professor, 33 Rodd, Rennell, 19 Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, 34 Rome, bishop of, 31 ----- gods in, 19, 20 ----- polytheism of, 27 Royal Society, 47 Sacraments, barbaric origin of, 34, 35 | \ \ I ) Saints, fictitious, 33 Salisbury, Lord, Presidential Address of, 77, 9i Samos, 17, 22 Saracens, 38 Savages, brain of, 100 Schemer, Professor, 78 School Boards, 105 Schwann, Theodor, 57 Science, Leading men of, 56, 57 Sedgwick; 71 Selden, 26, 93 Serapis, 36 Sin, essence of, 107 Sizzi, 44 Smith, Professor Robertson, 104 ------ William (geologist) 54 Social Statics, 79 Society, evolution of, 79, 82 ----- modification of struggle in, 108 Sociology, Principles of, 80, 85 ----- Study of, 98 Socrates, 14 Solar spectrum, lines in, 77 Sorbcnne, the, 49, 106 Soul, origin of belief in, 101, 102 ------ location of, 43 ------ Lucretius on location of, 18 Spain, intellectual advance in, 39 Spectroscope, the, 77 Spencer, Herbert, 20, 54, 55, 71, 76-86, 98, 101, 106 Spinoza, 44 Spiritualism, 65-69 Spontaneous generation, 16, 37 Sprengel, 54, 57 St. Hilaire, 50, 53 Stokes, Sir G. G., 98 Stone, ages of, 19, 21, 103 | Strabo, 48 Strife as an “ element,” 14 Struggle for life, 60, 63, 107 Suarez, Francisco, 94 Synthetic Philosophy, 78 ----- abstract of the, 83-85 ----- first draft of, 85 Table of Greek Philosophers, 22 Tacitus, 27 Thales, 11, 12, 15 Theology and Evolution, final issue between, " 94 Theophrastus, 11, 14 Theosophy, 12 Transubstantiation, origin of belief in, 34 Turgot, 24, 106 Tylor, Dr., 73, 101, 104 Tyndall, Professor, 87, 88, 91 Usher, Archbishop, 48 Van Helmont, 16 Vatican Council on Creation, 21 Vesalius, 43 Vestiges of Creation, 54, 61, 89 Virgin Mary, 32 Virgins, Black, 33 Visual sensations, subjective, 68 Von Baer, 54, 57, 81, 83, 85 Von Mohl, 54, 57 Votive offerings, 32 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 61-69 —— as biologist, 64 ----- as spiritualist, 65-69 ----- theory of origin of species identical with Darwin’s, 63 “Wallace’s Line,” 62 Water as primary substance, 11 Water-worship, 32, 33 Weismann, 54 Wells, Dr. W. C., 73 Wesley, John, 30, 49 Whewell, Dr., 70 White, Dr., 48 Wilberforce, Bishop, and the Origin of Species, 71 ----- and Huxley, 90 Wilson, Archdeacon, 71, 93 Winifred’s Well, St., 33 Witchcraft, belief in, 30 ----- causes of decay of belief in, 40 Worms, Darwin on the Action of, 74 Xenophanes, 12, 16 Zahm, Professor, 94 Zeller, 12 Zeno, 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. 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Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1902 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA1558 N127 N128 Subject The topic of the resource Evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Pioneers of evolution from Thales to Huxley : with an intermediate chapter on the causes of arrest of the movement), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Evolution NSS Science Scientists