Title: Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation
Author: George McCready Price
Release date: September 3, 2004 [eBook #13370]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Bryan Ness and PG Distributed Proofreaders
The great world disaster, ushered in with the dawn of that
August morning in 1914, has already brought revolutionary
changes in many departments of our thinking. But not the least
of the surprises awaiting an amazed world, whenever attention
can again be directed to such subjects, will be the realization
that we have now definitely outgrown many notions in science
and philosophy which in the old order of things were supposed
to have been eternally settled.
There are but two theories regarding the origin of our world
and of the various forms of plants and animals upon it,
Creation and Evolution,--the latter assuming many
modifications.
The essential idea of the Evolution theory is
uniformity; that is, it seeks to show that life in all
its various forms and manifestations probably originated by
causes similar to or identical with forces and processes now
prevailing. It teaches the absolute supremacy and the past
continuity of natural law as now observed. It says that the
changes now going on in our modern world have always been in
action and that these present-day natural changes and processes
are as much a part of the origin of things as anything that
ever took place in the past. In short, Evolution as a
philosophy of nature is an effort to smooth out all distinction
between Creation and the ordinary processes of nature that are
now under the régime of "natural law."
On the other hand, the essential idea of the doctrine of
Creation is that, back at a period called the "beginning,"
forces and powers were brought into exercise and results were
accomplished that have not since been exercised or
accomplished. That is, the origin of the first organic forms,
indeed of the whole world as we know it, was essentially and
radically different from the ways in which these forms
are perpetuated and the world sustained to-day. Time is
in no way the essential idea in the problem. The question of
how much time was occupied in the work of Creation is of
no importance, neither is the question of how long ago
it took place. The one essential idea is that in its nature
Creation is essentially inscrutable; we can never hope to know
just how it was accomplished; we cannot expect to know the
process or the details, for we have nothing with which to
measure it. The one essential thing in the doctrine of Creation
is that the origin of our world and of the things upon it came
about at some period of time in the past by a direct and
unusual manifestation of Divine power; and that since this
original Creation other and different forces and powers have
prevailed to sustain and perpetuate the forms of life and
indeed the entire world as then called into existence.
Accordingly, we might establish the Evolution doctrine by
showing that matter can be made de novo, that energy can
be created or increased in amount, that life can be made from
the not-living, and that new and distinct forms of life can be
produced in modern times,--all by natural law as now
prevailing.
Or we can practically demonstrate the historical reality of a
direct Creation at some time in the past, if we can show that
the net results of all modern science tend to prove that the
forces and processes now in operation can never account for the
origin of things; that matter, and energy, and life, and the
various forms of life must all have had an origin essentially
different from anything now going on around us.
This indicates the line of argument adopted in the following
pages.
The Evolution theory has been widely discussed and accepted in
modern times. Indeed it has had a fair chance and an open field
for several decades. What is the present situation of the
controversy? The friends of the Bible and of old-fashioned
Christianity need to know the real facts of the present
situation.
Every now and then the news despatches report that the great
Professor So-and-so has at last really produced life from the
not-living, or has obtained some absolutely new type of life by
some wonderful feat of breeding. Or some geologist or
archæologist has discovered in the earth the missing link
which connects the higher forms of life with the lower, or
which bridges over the gulf between man and the apes. Thus many
people who get their "science" through the daily papers really
believe that these long-looked-for proofs of Evolution have at
last been demonstrated, and hence they receive without question
the confident assertions of the camp followers of science
published at space rates in the Sunday supplements that all
intelligent men of to-day have long ago accepted the Evolution
doctrine.
But in spite of the quick dissemination of news and the
universal spread of education, it seems but a slow process for
the really important discoveries of modern science to filter
down through such media as the current periodicals to the rank
and file of society. The situation seems to illustrate the old
adage that a lie will travel round the world while truth is
getting on her shoes. Thus it happens that the common people
are still being taught in this second decade of the twentieth
century many things that real scientists outgrew nearly a
generation ago, and assertions are still being bandied around
in the individual sciences which are wholly unwarranted by a
general survey of the whole field of modern natural
science. Indeed, in almost every one of the separate
sciences the arguments upon which the theory of Evolution
gained its popularity a generation or so ago are now known by
the various specialists to have been blunders, or mistakes, or
hasty conclusions of one kind or another. Thus the market value
of all the various subsidiary stocks of the Evolution group has
been steadily declining in their respective home markets, and
now stands away below par; while strange to say the stock of
the central holding company itself is still quoted at
fictitiously high figures.
This curious--not to say deplorable--situation has developed
largely because of the modern system of strict specialization
in the various departments of science. Each scientist feels
compelled by an unwritten but rigid code of professional ethics
to confine himself strictly to the cultivation of the little
plot of ground on which he happens to be working, and is
forbidden to express an opinion about what he may know has been
discovered on another plot of ground on which his neighbor is
working, except by express permission. In other words, science
teaching has now become strictly a matter of authority, this
authority being vested in the various specialists; and nobody
is permitted to look at it in a broad way, or to frame a
general induction from the sum of all the facts of nature now
discovered, under penalty of scientific excommunication. The
scientific code of ethics forbids any general view of the
woods: each man must confine himself to the observation of the
particular tree in front of his own nose.
But these pages have been prepared under the idea that it is
high time to take a more general survey of the geography, time
to take our eyes off the various individual trees, and to look
at the woods. Perhaps in some respects they may be regarded as
too technical for ordinary readers. But if this is the case, it
is because the writer had to choose between this somewhat
technical treatment of the subject and the alternative danger
of making loose and inaccurate statements or dealing in
glittering generalities too vague to carry conviction. As it
is, the writer is here trying to give directly to the general
public the results of years of special research in correlating
the data from many scattered departments of science,--results
that most scientists would feel obliged to reserve for the
select few of some learned society, to be published
subsequently in the Reports of its "Transactions," and to find
their way after years of delay into the main currents of human
thought. But these dilatory methods of professional pedantry,
miscalled "ethics," shall not longer be allowed to delay the
publication of highly important principles which the public are
entitled to know at once, and to know at first hand. Then, too,
it is more than doubtful if any purely academic body could be
found willing to become responsible for giving to the world
conclusions so contrary to the vogue of the present day.
That these brief chapters may clear up the doubts of some, and
encourage the faith of many, is the object of their publication
in this non-professional form.
G. McC. P.
I. MATTER AND ITS ORIGIN
II. THE ORIGIN OF ENERGY
III. LIFE ONLY FROM LIFE
IV. THE CELL AND THE LESSONS IT TEACHES
V. WHAT IS A "SPECIES"?
VI. MENDELISM AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
VII. GEOLOGY AND ITS LESSONS
VIII. CREATION AND THE
CREATOR
I
When we were told by a prominent scientist just the other day
that "electricity is now known to be molecular in structure,"
it almost took our breath away. And when we were informed that
certain well-known chemical elements had been detected in the
very act of being changed over into other well-known elements,
with the prospect of such a transformation of the elements
being quite the normal thing throughout nature, the very earth
seemed to be slipping away from under our feet. Some of the
closely related discoveries, such as the fact that the X-rays
show a spectrum susceptible of examination, were not so
disconcerting in themselves; but the marvellous pictures of the
structure of the atom elicited by these discoveries made many
good people almost question whether our venerable experimenters
had not been indulging in pipe dreams amid their laboratory
work.
Do we, then, begin to understand the real composition of
matter? Does it have component parts, in the materialistic
sense; or is what we call matter only a mysterious
manifestation of energy? And if the latter be our answer, can
we hope to settle the problem objectively and so conclusively
that it will stay settled? In short, do we, regarding these
border-line subjects between metaphysics and natural science,
know anything more than our fathers and our grandfathers?
It will be convenient to consider these problems under two
heads: the composition of matter, and the origin of matter.
II
1. It was long ago recognized that matter must be composed of
particles which are driven farther apart by heat and are
brought closer together by cold, thus laying the foundation for
the theory of the molecular composition of matter. But not
until the time of Dalton, about a hundred years ago, was it
proved that the molecule itself, the unit of physical change,
is capable of definite division into atoms, the units of
chemical change. This conception of the molecules and atoms as
the ultimate units of which matter is composed maintained its
place until the discovery of radioactivity and its associated
phenomena, about 1896; since which time we have definitely
ascertained that even the atoms are separable into still
smaller units, and that possibly these units are all
alike. On this last possibility, it would surely be a most
amazing fact if such multitudinous "properties" of bodies could
be produced merely by variations in the arrangements of these
ultimate units into atoms, or in some other way which produces
vast differences in properties by combinations of units that
are nevertheless mere duplicates of one another.
As hydrogen is the lightest of the elements, it has been a
favorite theory with scientists that the various elements are
all composed of combinations of hydrogen atoms. But since many
of the elements have atomic weights which cannot be made exact
multiples of that of hydrogen, it has been felt that there must
be some other smaller unit than the hydrogen atom; or else that
these hydrogen atoms themselves change in weight when they
combine to form other atoms. But mass seems to be the one
unchangeable characteristic of matter; hence it was felt that
any change of weight is almost unthinkable, and so a solution
was sought in the direction of still further dividing the
hydrogen atom, the smallest unit concerned in chemical change,
as then understood. But now the facts and principles brought to
light in connection with the studies of radioactivity have
settled it that we actually do have a much smaller unit than
the hydrogen atom, one of only about 1/1760 its mass, in fact;
and that this smallest of the small things of nature is none
other than a particle of negative electricity, now called an
electron.
That the atoms of all the elements must have a common unit of
composition, that they behave as if composed of ultimate
particles that may be regarded as duplicates of one another,
has long been regarded as an inevitable conclusion from the
Periodic Law of Mendeleef. This law says that the physical as
well as the chemical properties of the various elements depend
upon their atomic weights, or as it is stated in the language
of mathematics, the properties of an element are functions of
its atomic weight. This fact of the variation in the properties
of elements in accord with their atomic weights has been even
more strikingly illustrated by the behavior of discharges of
electricity through rarified gases, as well as by the facts of
radioactivity. To quote the words of Sir J.J. Thompson, "The
transparency of bodies to Roentgen rays, to cathode rays, to
the rays emitted by radioactive substances, the quality of the
secondary radiation emitted by the different elements, are all
determined by the atomic weight of the element."[1]
Just recently we have had opened up before us a still more
intimate inner-circle view of the composition of matter. H.G.J.
Moseley, a young man only twenty-six years of age, at an
English university, devised a method of examining the spectra
of the various elements by means of the X-rays. He found in
this way that the principal lines of these various spectra are
connected by a remarkably simple arithmetical relationship; for
when the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic
weights, they show a graded advance from one to another equal
to successive additions of the same electrical unit charge,
thus indicating a real gamut of the elements that we can run up
by adding or run down by subtracting the same unit of
electrical charge. It is pitiable to have to record that next
year this scientific genius was killed in the ill-fated
Gallipoli expedition against Turkey.
Thus in many fairly independent ways we are brought around to
this same idea of a common structure underlying all the many
seeming diversities manifested by what we call matter.
The phenomena of radioactivity were discovered accidentally in
1896 by the French chemist Becquerel. Many investigators
immediately began working along this promising line, and two
years later Madam Curie, in association with others, discovered
the new element radium. Soon it was discovered that radium and
several other substances are continually giving off radiations
at an enormous rate, that no change of chemical combination, no
physical change of condition appears to have the slightest
effect in slowing or increasing this discharge of emanations,
while no scientific apparatus yet devised can detect any change
in the substances left behind either in respect to weight or
any other properties as the result of these enormous losses of
energy. Accordingly some people not unnaturally were ready to
draw the conclusion that those most firmly established laws of
physics and chemistry, the laws of the conservation of energy
and of matter, were overthrown by this astonishing behavior of
these newly discovered substances. However, only a few more
years of study and investigation were necessary to prove that
this last conclusion was wholly unwarranted; and to-day these
laws of the conservation of energy and of matter are more
firmly established than ever.
The thing that has gone by the board is the old idea of the
atoms as the indivisible and irreducible minima of the material
universe. For not only do all the radioactive substances give
off particles of helium gas positively electrified, but all
bodies, no matter what their composition, can by suitable
treatment, such as exposing them to ultra-violet light, or
raising them to incandescence, be made to give off
electrons or negatively charged particles, and these
electrons are always the same no matter from what kind of
substance they come. In a somewhat similar way, we always
get positively electrified particles of the mass of the
hydrogen atom, or about 1,760 times the mass of the electron,
whenever we send an electric charge through a gas at very low
pressure, no matter what the kind of gas. Whether or not
these positive units will yet prove susceptible of being split
up into smaller particles comparable to the electrons, is
merely a subject for conjecture. We have no proof that they
will. At the present time what we call matter seems to be
composed of these positive units and of the electrons which are
about 1/1760 as great; and in the present state of our
knowledge these facts suffice to explain all the properties of
matter. Thus we can either say that electricity is composed of
matter, or say that matter is composed of electricity; and
human language at best is such a clumsy vehicle of thought that
scientifically and philosophically the one statement is as
correct and as reasonable as the other.
And probably we shall never be able to learn any more than
this. We have arrived at a sort of box-within-a-box theory of
the make-up of matter. By a very elaborate system of unpacking,
or by some violent external force that makes the inside burst
open, as it were, we seem to be able to make pieces fly off
from the atoms, these pieces being then projected into space
with enormous force and velocity. There are theories galore of
the structure of the atom; but as Prof. E.P. Lewis has said,
most of these theories are so impossible as to be absurd, or so
speculative that "they suggest no experimental tests for their
validity."[2] Just at present Rutherford's theory of the
structure of the atom is quite popular. This postulates a
nucleus composed of a group of positive units and electrons,
with an excess of the positive charges equal to half the atomic
weight, with an equal number of electrons circulating about
this nucleus in rings. Bohr's theory, which is not very
different from this, has perhaps even more friends, and it is
supported by the remarkable discoveries of the lamented
Moseley. But we must not take such theories too seriously. As
Kayser has said, any true theory of the make-up of the atoms
must assume an absolutely full and perfect knowledge of all
electrical and optical processes, and is therefore beyond our
dreams. Or as Professor Planck said in his Columbia lectures,
we are not entitled to hope that we shall ever be able to
represent truly through any physical formulæ the internal
structure of the atom.
III
2. We must now take up the second phase of our subject, the
problem of the origin of matter.
Before we knew anything of radioactivity we could have
dismissed such a subject briefly by quoting the law of the
conservation of matter, which says that matter can neither be
created nor destroyed by any means known to science. By our
knowledge of radioactivity we can make our answer a little more
learned, a little less abrupt, but none the less discouraging
to the advocate of the development hypothesis. We can tell how
the elements of high atomic weight, such as uranium and
thorium, are constantly giving off particles and are thus by
loss or decomposition being changed over into other elements,
such as radium, niton, polonium and lead. But our new knowledge
compels us ultimately to give the same answer as before,
namely, that we still do not know how matter ever could have
originated, except that "in the beginning" it was called
into existence by the fiat of Him whom we Christians worship as
our God, the Creator. Thus we reach the conception of the
universe as that of a great clock gradually running down, which
is certainly the antithesis of that picture so long held before
us by the advocates of the development theory.
Uranium is a rather rare element, though known for over a
hundred years, and has an atomic weight of 238.5. In
decomposing it gives off first a helium atom, weight 4; and
after this action has been repeated three times the substance
left is radium, atomic weight about 226.4. Thus radium is
simply uranium after it has lost three helium atoms. Radium in
its disintegration gives off three kinds of particles, namely,
helium atoms (positively electrified), β-rays or
electrons, and γ-rays, the latter being identical with
the X-rays, and having penetrating power sufficient to carry
them through six inches of lead or a foot of solid iron. The
final stage in this process of disintegration is the ordinary
element lead, in which condition the atoms seem to have reached
relative stability. Whether or not our stock of lead, with our
other common elements that are not radioactive, was originally
produced by the disintegration of these other elements, is
merely a matter of conjecture. We know nothing at all about
it.
The length of time it takes for half the atoms of an element
to change is called its "life" or period. The periods of most
of the radioactive substances have been calculated, that of
uranium being very long. The calculated period of radium is
2,500 years, while that of polonium is only 202 days, and that
of niton 5.6 days. These unquestioned facts, together with the
enormous amount of heat evolved by the disintegration of these
substances (that from radium being about 250,000 times the heat
evolved by the combustion of carbon), have thrown a great deal
of doubt upon the older estimates of the age of the earth.
The discussion of the details of these theories would be
unprofitable. But through the mists of all these conflicting
theories and probabilities two facts of tremendous importance
for our modern world emerge in clear relief, namely, that the
grand law of the conservation of matter still holds true, and
hence that the matter of our world must have had an origin
at some time in the past wholly different in degree and
different in kind from any process going on around us that we
call a natural process. These elements of high atomic
weight that break down into others of lower atomic weight may
be so rare because they have been about all used up in this
process. At any rate, so far from revealing the origin of
matter as a process now going on, these phenomena are an
objective demonstration that all matter is more or less
unstable and liable under some unknown but ever-acting force to
lose some portion of that fund of energy with which it seems to
have been primarily endowed. Not the evolution of matter but
the degeneration of matter is the plain and unescapable
lesson to be drawn from these facts. The varieties of matter
may change greatly, and one variety or one chemical element may
be transformed into another. But this transformation is by
loss and not by gain. It is degeneration and not upward
evolution that is now opened up before our astonished eyes by
this peep into the ultimate laboratories of nature; and he is
surely a blind observer who cannot read in these facts the
grand truth that all this substance called matter with which
science deals in her manifold studies must at some time in the
past, I care not when, have been called into existence in
some manner no longer operative. The past eternity of
matter, as well as its progressive development from the simple
to the complex, seems manifestly out of consideration in view
of the facts as we now know them. There is no ambiguity in the
evidence. So far as modern science can throw light on the
question, there must have been a real Crea tion of the
materials of which our world is composed, a Creation wholly
different both in kind and in degree from any process now going
on.
IV
A supposed objection has been raised to this view, based on
the vastness of the universe as we now know it. Whether or not
the universe is really infinite in extent, it is certainly of
an extent that is practically infinite, so far as our powers of
observation or of reasoning are concerned. But this practically
infinite universe is not a bit harder to account for than would
be a definitely limited universe, say of the size of our solar
system. If the spectroscope shows that the far distant parts of
the universe contain many of the same elements as are found in
our solar system, we need not be surprised, since all are alike
the work of the same Creator. Nor would this fact that the
universe seems to be composed of similar materials throughout
tend in any way to prove that all these parts of the universe
were brought into existence at the same time, nor yet that our
solar system was refashioned out of some of the common stock of
the universe already on hand, as the nebular hypothesis
supposes. For all that we can tell to the contrary, it would
seem probable that the materials of our solar system were
called into existence expressly for the position they are now
occupying; and this seems to be the plain import of the record
in Genesis. Of one thing, however, we can be certain,--these
materials must at some time have been called into existence by
methods or ways that are no longer in operation around us. "In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
V
Some remarks are necessary here regarding the homogeneousness
of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed
of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates
of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as
seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above,
would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no
means. On the contrary, I think I can show in a very few words
not only that this homogeneousness of matter is the only
rational view of the composition of the material universe, but
also that it is the only view consistent with Christian Theism
and with the doctrine of Creation.
The theory of the atoms with their inherent and unchangeable
properties, which prevailed during the greater part of the
nineteenth century, naturally led us to look upon these
properties as inherent in the things themselves. This was
indeed materialism. This view, however, constantly impelled us
to find out the essential differences between the various kinds
of atoms, so as to "account for" their varying behaviors. And
no matter how far we push such inquiries, this materialistic
attitude of mind will control us so long as we think we are
dealing with substances which are intrinsically different. If
the differences are innate or inherent in the things
themselves, we must naturally endeavor to find out why and how
they are different; and no matter how far we go along this road
we are always headed in the direction of stark materialism. On
the other hand, to say that the "properties" of the atoms are
not inherent in themselves, but are imposed on them by an
external ceaselessly acting power, the will of the Creator,
would be in full accord with Biblical theism; and then we might
naturally say that the ultimate particles of which matter is
composed may well be regarded as alike and mere duplicates of
one another. And this, as we have seen, is just what modern
discoveries in radioactivity are teaching us regarding the
make-up of the substances that we call matter.
But an objection at once arises. How can these primordial
units of which matter is composed behave so differently, if
they are really alike, mere duplicates of one another?
We may not as yet be able to tell just why and how; but we
have in the cells of which all plants and animals are composed
an analogy which is almost perfect, if not quite.
These component units of organic matter, the individual cells,
as will be explained later, seem physically and even chemically
mere duplicates of one another. They may not all be of the same
size; but they are all composed of protoplasm, and the
protoplasm of plants cannot be distinguished from that of
animals by any physical or chemical tests known to modern
science. The protoplasm in the brain of a bird is the same as
that in its toes; and no metaphysical subtilties about heredity
have ever explained why the one does a different work from the
other. The plain fact is that different cells, composed of
identical protoplasm and structurally alike, act very
differently; and there is no scientific reason based on
innate properties that gives us even a glimmer of a reason why.
We have searched a long time along this road; but there is no
prospect of finding an explanation; we are merely running up a
cul-de-sac with no view beyond. From the materialistic
point of view, nobody knows why protoplasm acts as it does,
least of all, why some masses of protoplasm act one way, and
exact duplicates act differently. But if, on the other
hand, we look beyond the facts and methods of physics and
chemistry, and even beyond the most plausible theories of
genetics, we can readily explain this remarkable action of the
cells as the result of the will of an ever acting, omniscient,
almighty God. Certainly nothing else is adequate to explain the
behavior of living cells.
In a very similar way we must reason regarding the ultimate
units of matter, call them what we will, electrons, corpuscles,
or units of electricity. If these are mere duplicates of each
other, as science now teaches, they not only indicate by this
identity that they are "manufactured articles," as was long ago
pointed out of the atoms and molecules, but they also indicate
with all the force of a demonstration that nothing but an ever
present omniscient Intelligence could keep these duplicates
from always acting the same under similar external forces.
If gold and carbon, iron and oxygen are at bottom composed of
particles that are mere duplicates of each other, as seems to
be the case, how can these elements and the six dozen or more
others maintain their individuality throughout nature as we
know they do, even in the far distant stars, except by the
sleepless care of an Intelligence whose Word is as effective in
one part of the universe as in another, and to whose Word these
particles of matter can show no inertia and no disobedience,
because they have no powers or properties except what He has
imparted? This doctrine of the homogeneousness of matter is the
antithesis of materialism. It is consistent only with the
doctrine of an almighty and ever present God, and like many
other facts which have been developed by modern scientific
discoveries, it confirms the other primal doctrine of a literal
Creation "in the beginning."
VI
The conclusion which our minds are forced to draw from the
facts presented in this chapter is not doubtful, nor is it
difficult to state. Matter is not now being brought into
existence by any means that we call "natural." And yet the
facts of radioactivity very positively forbid the past eternity
of matter. Hence, the conclusion is syllogistic: matter
must have originated at some time in the past by methods or
means which are equivalent to a real Creation.
Thus far, at least, the record of Genesis is confirmed: "In
the beginning God created."
____________________
[1]Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XVII, 891. Cambridge
Edition.
[2]Nature, April 5, 1917.
I
What has been regarded by many as the greatest scientific
triumph of modern times was worked out about the middle of the
last century by James Prescott Joule and others, in determining
that a certain amount of mechanical energy is exactly
equivalent to a definite amount of heat. With this mechanical
equivalent of heat all the various other forms of energy have
also been correlated; until now we have the general law of the
Conservation of Energy, which says that energy can be neither
manufactured nor destroyed, but merely transformed and
directed. And this magnificent law, like that of the
conservation of matter, is strong evidence that there must have
been a real Creation at some time in the long ago, different
not merely in degree but in kind from anything known to modern
science.
Joule worked out the mechanical equivalent of heat by means of
his now famous experiment of churning water. He reasoned that
if the heat produced by friction, etc., is really energy in
another form, then the same amount of heat must always be
generated by the expenditure of a given amount of motion or
mechanical work. And this must be true, no matter whether this
work is expended in overcoming the friction between wood on
wood, iron on iron, or in any other conceivable way.
Accordingly, he devised an experiment in which paddle wheels
were made to rotate in a vessel of water by means of falling
weights somewhat like the weights of a clock. The amount of
work represented by the falling of the weights was easily
calculated, and so was the amount of rise in temperature of the
water caused by the friction of the water with the rotating
paddle wheels. In various other ways he measured the amount of
heat generated by a measured amount of work; and as the result
of all his experiments (with very slight corrections made since
by means of more exact apparatus), we now know that 778 foot
pounds of work produce heat enough to raise one pound of water
one degree Fahrenheit; or stated in the metric system, 427
kilogram meters of work will produce a calorie of heat.
Since these record-making experiments by Joule, the matter has
been verified over and over again in all sorts of ways; and
almost every kind of display of energy has been measured with
more or less exactness. Even the amount of food oxidized in the
human body is now known to be capable of correlation with the
other forms of energy, though necessarily very minute exactness
of measurement is scarcely attainable in this case. But no
scientist of to-day doubts that all the physiological processes
of animals or of plants conform exactly to the law of the
conservation of energy that energy is neither created nor
destroyed by any means known to science. In other words, the
amount of energy in our world, if science can at all determine
such a matter, seems to be a fixed quantity, gradually
being dissipated into space, it is true, but momently
replenished from the sun at exactly the same rate now as
hundreds or thousands of years ago. And while this energy is in
our world it is always capable of exact correlation in all of
its multitudinous forms, and is transformable back and forth
without increase and without loss.
On the discovery of the radioactive substances in 1896, some
persons hastily concluded that the law of the conservation of
energy was contradicted by the astonishing way in which these
substances acted. But further and more accurate experiments
have set this matter at rest, as indeed might have been
expected; for the law of gravitation itself is not more
immovably established in the make-up of the universe than this
magnificent law that energy cannot be created by any means
which we call natural.
In all ages there have been men who have spent their lives in
the vain effort to invent a machine out of which work could
constantly be obtained without the expenditure upon it of an
equal amount of work. But the United States patent office has
got so tired of receiving applications for patents based on
this idea of perpetual motion that they have long since refused
to issue any such patent where this principle is the manifest
object; and I suppose the governments of other countries have
taken a similar stand. And why? Because they know that energy
cannot now be created by any device, no matter how ingenious;
and they refuse to become a party to any scheme that seems to
imply that this modern creation of energy is within the bounds
of possibility.
Yet what is all this but a confirmation of the declaration
long ago made that "the works were finished from the foundation
of the world" (Heb. 4:3)? True, the energy we are constantly
employing seems to come to us from the sun; but we must
remember that the sun and its family of the solar system,
including the earth, were all made at the same time, that they
are bound together as parts of an indissoluble whole.
Accordingly, no one can say that the total amount of energy
called into existence at the creation of our solar system is
being added to at the present time. At any rate, so far as
modern science can judge of the matter, the total amount of
energy available for our world is a fixed quantity; and
its amount and the terms on which it was to be available for
our use were fixed or finished "from the foundation of the
world." While it is a very significant fact in this connection
that with all the multiform speculations which have been made
as to the physical source of the sun's heat, no explanation
wholly satisfactory has yet been made as to how this energy
coming to us from the sun is constantly replenished or
maintained.
II
The desire to find a material cause for all phenomena is
instinctive in the human mind, and has proved the chief impetus
in a thousand discoveries. And yet, unless we are on our guard,
it is liable to be a source of real error whenever we are
dealing with the deeper problems of thought. For when we have
pushed our way into the inner sanctuary of any department of
nature, we almost invariably come upon a deep chasm that we can
pass over only by building a bridge of words. Some of these
verbal bridges have been decorated with very dignified names,
such as "the luminiferous ether," "gravity," "chemical
affinity"; and when we have shifted from the one side of the
chasm to the other we impose upon the credulity of the public
(and even ourselves) by giving out the impression that these
words represent the real objective bridge on which we
crossed.
In how many ways do we by our theories dodge the crucial
problem of how energy is really transmitted, that is, how
matter can act on distant matter across seemingly vacant space.
Gravity, and indeed all the forms of the attractive forces,
come under this head. True, we observe certain regularities in
the way in which these phenomena occur, and the phenomenon at
one place seems to be somehow dependent on some exercise of
force at another place. And so we invent an ingenious theory,
and fortify it all around with ponderous algebraic artillery
for defense against all attack. And by persistent use of such
theories we hypnotize ourselves into the belief that we are
truly scientific in method, and are dealing with objective
realities, and that these learned theories are something more
than pretentious masks to hide our ignorance of real nature;
when in reality these theories seem to be only a material
screen to shield us from an embarrassing near view of the
immediate action of God in all the various phenomena of the
world; for not many find it a comfortable thought thus to live
continuously beneath the great Taskmaster's eye.
The theory of the luminiferous ether as the medium of the
transmission of light is one of these pretentious bridges of
words. Our advancing knowledge of electro-magnetic phenomena
may some day drive us back to a modified form of the
corpuscular theory of light, and then we can throw this of the
ether to the winds. In that case we would at least have a real
material cause for the phenomena with which we deal. While the
current theory of the ether has so many inconsistencies, and
attempts to bridge over so many real chasms in our thinking
that it seems truly astonishing to see it taught so long. By
the theory of the ether the problems are not solved, they are
merely postponed or evaded; for while solving one difficulty it
creates a multitude of its own. How then are we better off than
before without any such theory?
Being at liberty to invent any sort of qualities for their
ether, scientists have tried to imagine such a substance as
they think they need. The ether must be a kind of matter; but
unlike any matter that we know of it cannot have weight, or
else it would gravitate together here and there, thus becoming
more abundant in some places than in others; whereas the
need is for a material absolutely uniform throughout
space, even throughout the interiors of solid bodies, such as
the earth and the bodies upon the earth.
Another reason for supposing the ether to be a plenum,
filling absolutely all space, is that it must be perfectly
frictionless; and for this reason it cannot be composed of
particles with spaces between them. It must be frictionless,
for otherwise the planets would be retarded in their motions
through space. The earth, for instance, is moving along its
orbit at the rate of eighteen miles a second; and yet the ether
does not pile up in front of it, nor is it made rarer in the
wake of the earth. Moreover, during the thousands of years
during which astronomers have been making observations
absolutely no retardation has been detected in the motions of
the earth or of any of the heavenly bodies, even to the
smallest fraction of a second.
It is necessary to make the ether absolutely elastic and
absolutely rigid. We are acquainted with many materials that
are elastic, and with some that are comparatively rigid. But
the elastic substances that we are acquainted with are not
rigid, and the rigid substances are not elastic; and to assume
such contradictory qualities in the ether transports us far
beyond the bounds of experimental science.
These are but a few of the difficulties raised by the
assumption of the ether as a real entity; but as there is no
means of demonstrating its existence, except by arguing the
necessity of having such a medium to transmit radiant
energy, it follows that no multiplication of objections to the
theory is likely to refute it in the minds of those who feel
this necessity. Those who refuse to admit the possibility of
"action at a distance," who insist on inventing a connecting
material medium between every observed effect and some material
object with which it seems to be in causal connection, will, I
suppose, have to be allowed to exercise their ingenuity in any
way to satisfy their minds, even though they may have to revise
their theory with every fresh discovery in optics or
radioactivity.
There are many other ingenious mental devices, like this of
the ether, which seem to me only materialistic efforts to
postpone or to dodge the real vital lessons to be read from
natural phenomena,--efforts to push the real Cause back one
step farther into the shadow,--a last desperate effort, in the
face of the constantly accumulating evidence of modern
knowledge that the great First Cause is far more intimately
connected with life and motion than many are willing to
believe. We have already mentioned gravity and the other
attractive forces, such as cohesion and adhesion; but seemingly
very few people have ever paused to consider how utterly
inexplicable they still remain in any physical or materialistic
sense.
It is easy to explain any form of a push in a physical
way; but gravity is not a push but a pull. And how are
we to explain the method by which a body can act where it is
not, how explain in detail the way by which it can reach out
and pull in toward itself another separated body, and exert
this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? The law
of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in
which the results are accomplished, for our Creator is a God of
order. But there is no materialistic theory of the why
of gravitation that is worth employing the time of sensible,
truth-loving people. And we can rest assured that there never
will be any such real "explanation," save that this is the way
which the great Jehovah has ordained. Since such theories only
explain the known in terms of the unknown, they can serve only
as a sort of mental buffer or shield between us and the
conception of the direct working of a personal God, whose word
must always be as effective throughout the remotest corners of
His universe as near at hand, for the very simple reason that
matter has no "properties" which He has not imparted to it, and
accordingly it can have no innate inertia or reluctance to act
which God's word would need to overcome in order to induce it
to act, even when this word operates across the wide fields of
space. On this explanation these phenomena of "action at a
distance" are at least intelligible; while to me, and I speak
now as a scientist, they are intelligible in no other way.
III
There is another line of thought which has to do with living
organisms, but which I shall beg leave to anticipate and bring
in here at the close of this chapter, since it follows as a
direct corollary from the law of the Conservation of Energy.
Indeed, we might even term it the biological aspect of that
law.
As we have seen, we can neither create energy nor destroy it;
though we can lose it,--so far as this earth is
concerned. The vast fund of energy that daily comes streaming
to us from the sun is transmuted back and forth in a thousand
ways, though little by little it is dissipated off into space,
and we are dependent upon a fresh supply from the ever
replenished fountain.
Just so, though in a somewhat idealistic sense, is it with
what we may term vital energy. Cells, organisms, even whole
races, are subject to degeneration and decay. They cannot
acquire higher powers, though they may gradually lose what they
already have; as Bateson has recently told us that whatever
evolution there is must be by loss and not by gain. Water very
easily runs down hill; but cannot go up hill in and of itself.
Just so with the types of organic life. It was not merely an
idle sneer of the witty Frenchman, that science has not yet
explained how an ancestor can transmit what he has not got
himself. He cannot always transmit all that he himself actually
possesses of nature's gifts. Vitality becomes lowered, and the
type degenerates. Weismann has emphasized this idea in his
doctrine of "panmixia," or the withdrawal of selection, which
always results in degeneration. Selection, artificial or
natural, may serve to counteract this universal tendency of
organic life, but only approximately. As Sir William Dawson
says, "All things left to themselves tend to degenerate."
Little by little the endowment of vitality bestowed upon our
world at the beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned
to God who gave it; but, unlike the case of radiant energy, the
Creator has not established any regular source of vital supply
from without, no elixir of life for organic nature in general.
There is no longer within easy reach a tree of life from which
we may pluck and eat and live forever. And as the individual
grows old and dies, so do species and even whole tribes
degenerate and become extinct.
"From scarpéd cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"
"No biological generalization rests on a wider series of
observations, or has been subjected to a more critical
scrutiny, than that every living organism has come into
existence from a living portion or portions of a pre-existing
organism."[3]
"Was there anything so absurd as to believe that a number of
atoms, by falling together of their own accord, could make a
sprig of moss, a microbe, a living animal? ... It is utterly
absurd.... Here scientific thought is compelled to accept the
idea of creative power. Forty years ago I asked Liebig ... if
he believed that the grass and flowers, which we saw around us,
grew by mere mechanical force. He answered, 'No more than I
could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow
by mere chemical force.'"[4]
"Let them not imagine that any hocus-pocus of electricity or
viscous fluids would make a living cell.... Nothing approaching
to a cell of living creature has ever yet been made.... No
artificial process whatever could make living matter out of dead."[5]
I
Ever since René Descartes, in his Holland laboratory,
dissected the heads of great numbers of animals in order to
discover the processes of imagination and memory, men have been
seeking a physical or materialistic answer to such questions
as, What is life? What is it to be alive? How shall we
distinguish the living from the not-living?
No one of to-day, in the light of the correlation of vital
processes with the general law of the conservation of energy,
believes that life in plants and animals is a separate entity
which may exist outside of and apart from matter. In a
scientific sense, we only know life by its association with
living matter, which in its simplest form is known as
protoplasm. The latter has been termed the physical
basis of life, and so far as we know every material living
thing is composed wholly of protoplasm and of the structures
which it has built up.
This grayish, viscid, slimy, semi-transparent, semi-fluid
substance, similar to the white of an egg, is the most
puzzling, the most wonderful material with which science has to
deal. Chemically it is composed of various proteids, fats,
carbohydrates, etc., and these in turn of but very few
elements, all of which are common, and none of which are
peculiar to protoplasm itself. And yet its essential
properties, its mechanical as well as its chemical make-up,
have baffled the resources of our wisest men with all their
retorts and microscopes and other instruments of precision.
Protoplasm is essentially uniform and similar in appearance
and properties wherever found, whether in the tissues of the
human body, in a blade of grass, or in the green slime of a
stagnant pool. And yet probably no two samples of protoplasm
are ever exactly similar in all respects, though we may never
be able to detect their precise differences. These differences
are due to the fact that the stuff is alive, and within
it are constantly going on those changes accompanying
metabolism, or the building up and tearing down processes that
always accompany life. All separate masses of protoplasm, such
as the one-celled amoeba or the individual cells of our own
bodies, are constantly taking in food and as constantly
throwing off wastes. Hence, in the very nature of things, it is
impossible to find any mass of protoplasm absolutely pure. And
a further and impassable barrier to chemical analysis, or
indeed to any adequate scientific examination, lies in the fact
that we can never deal with protoplasm exactly as it is, since
no analysis can be performed upon it without destroying its
life. And yet even dead protoplasm, and especially its most
characteristic constituent, proteid, has been found the
most difficult material in the world to analyze, and nobody as
yet pretends to know its exact chemical make-up.
The constant effort of natural science to press back the
boundaries of the unknown is very liable to obscure some of the
things most essential to any system of clear thinking regarding
these matters. We are so prone to think that if only our
microscopes were a little stronger, if only we could devise
more effective methods of staining or of chemical analysis or
chemical synthesis, we might really find out what life is, or
what matter itself is; in short, that we might be able to solve
in a scientific way the old, old riddle of existence. But
already we have about reached the limits of the powers of the
microscope; and even if we could devise a way of seeing the
ultimate structures of which protoplasm is composed, how would
we be any better off? Would we not have to attribute to each
constituent of this living substance the properties which we
now attribute to the whole?--that is, the properties which we
attribute to masses of protoplasmic units, such as plants, or
birds, or human beings?
We look at ourselves and we feel sure that we have a separate
and real existence, that we are rationally conscious and are
endowed with choice and free will. We can say almost as much
for an intelligent bird or dog. But we hesitate to say how many
of these powers or characteristics of free and independent
personality can be assigned to the unicellular organisms, such
as the amoeba or the corpuscles of our blood. These one-celled
creatures are also alive, are just as truly alive as are those
composed of many cells. Even the corpuscles of which our bodies
are composed move, and eat, and grow, and seem really endowed
with intelligence like the higher forms of life. Suppose we
could go further than is now possible and could lay bare the
ultimate make-up of the chromatin of these one-celled
creatures, would we even then be able to prove that life with
all its properties is inherent in these material components of
the cells? In other words, would we really solve anything after
all? Or would we not rather be compelled to acknowledge that
the simplest, the most truly rational view of the question is
that in living matter we have merely a special manifestation of
the presence and the direct action of the God of nature which
we cannot so readily recognize in not-living matter? This, it
seems to me, is all that we really know, and all that we are
likely ever to know.
When we examine carefully the differences between the living
and the not-living, we see that the chief difference between
them is in their origin. The matter of growth is not a
real distinction; for crystals grow on the outside, while
inorganic liquids grow by intussusception, as when a soluble
substance is added to them, in very much the same way as an
animal grows by the ingestion of food. Even movement is hardly
an absolute distinction between the living and the not-living;
for no movement can be detected in quiescent seeds, which may
lie dormant for thousands of years; and on the other hand
inorganic foams when brought into contact with liquids of
different composition display movements that very closely
simulate those of the living matter. Lastly, irritability,
though so notably characteristic of living matter, is scarcely
peculiar to it, for many inorganic substances seem almost as
definitely responsive to external stimulation. But in the
matter of their origin there is a real and a most
fundamental difference. All living substance arises only from
other substance already living. It cannot arise from the
not-living; or at least it never has done so since the
beginning of scientific observation, though on this point have
been concentrated the learning and the laboratory technique of
thousands of chemists and microscopists.
It may not be out of place to quote here from one of the
classics dealing with this subject,--words that are just as
true to-day as when first written nearly half a century
ago:
"Let us place vividly in our imagination the picture of the
two great kingdoms of nature,--the inorganic and the
organic,--as these now stand in the light of the Law of
Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there
is no spontaneous generation of life? It is meant that the
passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is
hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world
is staked off from the living world by barriers that have never
yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no
modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor
any form of energy, nor any evolution, can endow a single atom
of the mineral world with the attribute of life. Only by the
bending down into this dead world of some living form can these
dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality; without
this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed in the
inorganic sphere forever.
"It is a very mysterious law which guards in this way the
portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in
nature more worth pondering for its strangeness, it is the
spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from
the living by the Law of Biogenesis, and denied forever the
possibility of resurrection within itself. The physical laws
may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may
account for the development of the organic. But of the point
where they meet,--of that strange border-land between the dead
and the living,--science is silent. It is as if God had placed
everything in earth and heaven in the hands of nature, but had
reserved a point at the genesis of life for His direct appearing."[6]
It would be superfluous to emphasize further this great
outstanding fact that the not-living cannot become the living
by any of the processes which we call natural; and it would be
presumptuous to attempt to emulate these eloquent words by
seeking to emphasize the completeness with which this great Law
of Biogenesis confirms the truth of a real Creation; for the
supreme grandeur and importance of this law could be only
obscured by so doing.
II
Perhaps some of the most impressive lessons on this subject
will be found in connection with the history of the discovery
of this great Law of Biogenesis, which says that life can come
only from life. For by studying the history of the way in which
this great Law has been established, we cannot fail to be
impressed with the thought that back of all the complex array
of living forms in our modern world which go on perpetuating
themselves in orderly ways according to natural law, they could
have originated only by a direct and real Creation, essentially
and radically different from any processes now going on.
The wisest of the ancients in Greece and Rome knew nothing of
this great law as we now know it. Aristotle, the embodiment of
all that the ancient world knew of natural science, expressly
taught that the lower forms of animals, such as fleas and
worms, even mice and frogs, sprang up spontaneously from the
moist earth. "All dry bodies," he declared, "which become damp,
and all damp bodies which are dried, engender animal life."
According to Vergil, bees are produced from the putrifying
entrails of a young bull. Such were the teachings of all the
Greeks and Romans, even of the scientists of the
post-Reformation period, some of whom had accumulated a very
considerable stock of knowledge concerning plants and
animals.
And similar absurdities continued to be taught until
comparatively modern times. Van Helmont, a celebrated alchemist
physician who flourished during the brilliant reign of Louis
XIV, wrote: "The smells which arise from the bottom of morasses
produce frogs, slugs, leeches, grasses, and other things." As a
recipe for producing a pot of mice offhand, he says that the
only thing necessary is partly to fill a vessel with corn and
plug up the mouth of the vessel with an old dirty shirt. In
about twenty-one days, the ferment arising from the dirty shirt
reacting with the odor from the corn will effect the
transmutation of the wheat into mice. The doctor solemnly
assures us that he himself had witnessed this wonderful fact,
and continues, "The mice are born full-grown; there are both
males and females. To reproduce the species it suffices to pair
them."
"Scoop out a hole in a brick," he says further, "put into it
some sweet basil, crushed, lay a second brick upon the first so
that the hole may be completely covered. Expose the two bricks
to the sun, and at the end of a few days the smell of the sweet
basil, acting as a ferment, will change the herb into real scorpions."[7]
Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of "Religio Medici," had
expressed a doubt as to whether mice may be bred by
putrifaction; but another scientist, Alexander Ross, disposed
of this suggestion by the following line of argument which was
supposed to be conclusive as a reductio ad absurdum:
"So may he (Sir Thomas Browne) doubt whether in cheese and
timber worms are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows'
dung; or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish,
snails, eels, and such like, be procreated of putrid matter,
which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it
is by formative power disposed. To question this is to question
reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go to
Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice,
begot of the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the in-habitants."[8]
When we remember that such nonsense constituted the wisdom of
the scientific world only about two centuries ago, we begin to
realize the fact that the doctrine of Biogenesis is indeed a
very modern doctrine. But it may be well to ask in passing, How
could the people of former ages understand or appreciate the
great truth of Creation as we moderns are able to do?
The first important step toward the refutation of this old
pagan doctrine of spontaneous generation was made by the
Italian, Redi, in 1668. He noticed that flies are always
present around decomposing meat before the appearance of
maggots, and he devised an experiment to keep the flies away
from actual contact with the meat. The meat putrified as usual,
but did not breed maggots; while the same kind of meat exposed
in open jars swarmed with them. He next placed some meat in a
jar with some wire gauze over the top. The flies were attracted
by the smell of the meat as usual, but could not reach the
meat. Instead they laid their eggs upon the gauze, where they
hatched in due time, while no maggots were generated in the
meat. Thus from this time onward it became gradually understood
that, at least in the case of all the larger and higher forms
of life, Harvey's dictum, as announced some years previously,
was true, and that life comes only from life.
But the invention of the microscope opened the way for a
renewal of the controversy regarding the origin of life.
Bacteria were discovered in 1683; and it was soon observed that
no precautions with screens or other stoppers could prevent
bacteria and other low organisms from breeding in myriads in
every kind of organic matter. Here apparently was an entirely
new foundation for the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It
was freely admitted that all the higher forms of life arise
only by process of natural generation from others of their own
kind; but did not these microscopic organisms prove that there
was "a perpetual abiogenetic fount by which the first steps in
the evolution of living organisms continued to arise, under
suitable conditions, from inorganic matter"?[9]
The famous "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any
sketch of the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An
elaborate illustrated account covering their alleged natural
history was printed in one of the early volumes of the Royal
Society of London. Buds of a particular tree growing near the
sea were described as producing barnacles, and these falling
into the water were alleged to be transmuted into geese. Nor
should we omit mention of Huxley's Bathybius Haeckelii,
a slimy substance supposed to exist in great masses in the
depths of the ocean and to consist of undifferentiated
protoplasm, the exhaustless fountain from which all other forms
of life had been derived. Not long after Huxley had given it a
formal scientific name in 1868, it was discovered to be merely
a precipitate of gypsum thrown down from sea water by alcohol,
and thus a product of clumsy manipulation in the laboratory,
instead of a natural product of the deep sea. The
disappointment of those opposing biogenesis was severe; but the
lesson is still of value to the world to-day.
The masterly work of Tyndall and Louis Pasteur in doing for
the bacteria and protozoa what Redi had done for the larger
organisms, is too much a matter of modern contemporary history
to need recital here. Upon this great truth of life only from
life is based all the recent advances in the treatment and
prevention of germ diseases and all the triumphs of modern
surgery. The housewife puts up canned fruit with the utmost
confidence because she believes in this great Law of
Biogenesis. It is because we all believe in it that we use
antiseptics and fumigators and fly screens.
III
But what are the lessons to be learned from this great fact,
and what bearing has this fact on the old Bible doctrine of a
literal Creation?
Life comes now only from preëxisting life. But at some
time there was no life on the globe. It does not take any great
exercise of "philosophic faith," as Huxley suggested, "to look
beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time" and recognize
that at this beginning of things there must have taken place a
most wonderful event, essentially and radically different from
anything now going on, namely, the beginning of organic life.
But would not this be a real Creation in the old-fashioned
sense of this term? We cannot avoid this conclusion; nor is
there anything in either science or philosophy to indicate that
this creation of the living from the not-living was confined to
one mere speck of protoplasm. It is absolutely certain
that it required a real Creation to produce life from the
not-living at all; and it is just as reasonable that this
exercise of creative power may have taken place in all parts
of the earth at the same general time, as the Bible
teaches. For if a Being saw fit to create life at all, why
should He stop with one or two bits of protoplasmic units? An
architect who can make his own bricks and other building
material, can surely build what he desires out of these
materials. Common sense tells us that, if the Creator really
created life in the beginning, He did not stop with a few
specks of protoplasm here and there over the earth. The ability
to create life from the not-living implies the ability to make
full-grown trees or birds or beasts in twenty-four hours,
instead of waiting for months or years, as is usual at the
present time.
As we have already found regarding matter and energy, so of
life. The record in Genesis is confirmed, for modern science
compels us to believe in Creation as the only possible origin
of life,--a Creation entirely different from anything now going
on, and one that can never be made to fit into any scheme of
uniformitarian evolution.
____________________
[3]P.C. Mitchell, in Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. III,
p. 952.
[4]Lord Kelvin in the London Times, May 4, 1903.
[5]Lord Kelvin, to a class of Medical Students, October 28,
1904.
[6]Henry Drummond, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World,"
Chapter I.
[7]"Louis Pasteur, His Life and Labors," p. 89.
[8]Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 64.
[9]Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 64.
I
With his usual vigor and expressiveness Henry Drummond has
given us a picture of the remarkable fact that the cells of all
plants and animals are strikingly alike, especially the single
cells from which all originate. It is easy for any one to
distinguish between an oak, a palm tree, and a lichen, while a
botanist will have elaborate scientific distinctions which he
can discern between them. "But if the first young germs of
these three plants are placed before him," says Drummond, and
the botanist is called upon to define the difference, "he finds
it impossible. He cannot even say which is which. Examined
under the highest powers of the microscope, they yield no clue.
Analyzed by the chemist, with all the appliances of his
laboratory, they keep their secret.
"The same experiment can be tried with the embryos of animals.
Take the ovule of the worm, the eagle, the elephant, and of man
himself. Let the most skilled observer apply the most searching
tests to distinguish the one from the other, and he will
fail.
"But there is something more surprising still. Compare next
the two sets of germs, the vegetable and the animal, and there
is no shade of difference. Oak and palm, worm and man, all
start in life together. No matter into what strangely different
forms they may afterwards develop, no matter whether they are
to live on sea or land, creep or fly, swim or walk, think or
vegetate,--in the embryo, as it first meets the eye of science,
they are indistinguishable. The apple which fell in Newton's
garden, Newton's dog Diamond, and Newton himself, began life at
the same point."[10]
In these remarks, of course, Drummond is dealing with the
unicellular primal form, "as it first meets the eye of
science"; and while certain slight peculiarities (such as the
constant number of chromosomes) have been detected as
characteristic of the cells of certain forms, yet for all
practical purposes these words of Drummond are just as true
to-day as when first written. Possibly it is because of a
failure in our technique or from a lack of power in our
microscopes that these wonderful protoplasmic units from which
all living things originate seem identical. But it is equally
possible that they are really identical in structure and
in chemical composition, and that only the ever present
watchcare of the great Author of nature directs the one to
develop in a certain manner, "after its kind," and another in
still another manner, "after its kind." At any rate, the
protoplasm of which they are all alike composed
is identical wherever found, so far as any scientific
tests have yet been able to determine.
II
There are many varieties of single cells known to science
which maintain an independent individual existence. Among the
unicellular plants are the bacteria, while the unicellular
animals are known as the protozoa. And although perhaps I ought
to apologize to the reader for seeming to anticipate here a
part of the discussion of the problem of "species," yet it
seems necessary to say a few words here regarding the
"persistence" of these unicellular forms.
Among the diseases which have been proved to be due to
protozoa are malaria, amoebic dysentery, and syphilis; while
among the much larger number which are due to bacteria,
bacilli, or other vegetable parasites, are cholera, typhoid
fever, the plague, pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and
leprosy.
One of the difficulties attending the study of "species" among
the higher forms of plants and animals has always been the
length of time required to obtain any large number of
generations on which to make observations. In the case of such
plants as peas, wheat, corn, or indeed almost any form of plant
life, it is only with difficulty that more than one generation
a year can be obtained; and when two or more generations a year
are produced, they are produced under more or less unnatural
conditions. So that it takes almost a lifetime carefully to
test and record in a thoroughly scientific way the results of
any extensive experiments regarding variation and heredity.
In the case of mice or rats or rabbits or guinea pigs, many
more generations can be obtained in a few years; but in the
case of the larger kinds of animals the time taken for
development to maturity and for gestation is often much
prolonged; and scientific observation of an exact character has
been in vogue for so short a time that there has always been
the chance for advocates of evolution to take refuge under the
plea that, if we only had longer and more carefully conducted
observations, we could really see species in the making, one
form becoming transformed into a distinct form, or perhaps
giving rise to another and distinct form as an offshoot.
But in the case of the bacteria and protozoa, we can have a
new generation every hour or so, sometimes every half hour.
True, these forms of minute life have been under observation
for only a few years; but their effects have in many
cases been observed for almost the entire length of human
history. No physician would tolerate the suggestion that the
bacillus of cholera can produce the symptoms of diphtheria, or
the tubercle bacillus produce the symptoms of leprosy. Nor will
any scientist deny that such diseases as the plague,
tuberculosis, or diphtheria are identical with diseases which
ravaged Rome or Greece or Egypt thousands of years ago. And as
the symptoms of these modern diseases are similar to those
recorded by acute observers in Greece or Egypt two thousand
years or more ago, we must conclude that the organisms causing
these symptoms are doubtless identical. Similar remarks might
be made regarding fermentation and other forms of decay.
In the case of a form of bacteria which reaches maturity and
redivides in half an hour, the number of individual forms
existing at the end of two days would need about twenty-eight
figures to represent it. Doubtless these forms never multiply
at this rate uninterruptedly for any great length of time, or
else they would occupy the whole world to the exclusion of
every other form of life. And doubtless instances arise where
the period of growth to maturity and division is prolonged to
several times the half-hour period mentioned above. But in any
case, as we contemplate the length of time during which such
well marked diseases as diphtheria, leprosy, or the plague have
been known, we must acknowledge that these unicellular forms
seem to breed true during a most astonishingly long
period. How can we deny that this "persistence" of these
unicellular forms constitutes a very strong argument in favor
of the "fixity" of these forms?
III
But we must proceed to examine the behavior of the various
kinds of cells of which the various multicellular organisms are
composed.
Plants were known to be composed of cells, and their cells
were studied and described some years before it was understood
that animals also are composed of cells as units. Even then,
however, the first propounders of the cell theory (Schleiden
and Schwann) had no clear or accurate idea of the origin of
cells, or of their essential characters and structure. As to
origin, they supposed that cells arose by a sort of
crystallization from a mother liquor; and as to structure, they
looked upon the cell-wall as the really important part, the
fluid contents being quite subordinate. Hugo von Mohl (1846)
applied to the fluid contents of the cell the term
"protoplasm," and Max Schultze (1861) showed that this
protoplasm is really identical in all organisms, plants and
animals, also that the cell-wall is frequently absent in many
animal tissues and in many unicellular forms, indicating that
the protoplasm is the really important substance. By this time
also it had become known that cells never arise de novo,
as had been supposed by the earlier investigators, but that
cells arise only by division of preexisting cells; or as Rudolf
Virchow (1858) expressed it, "omnis cellula e cellulā."
It was, however, many years before the details of the growth
and reproduction of the cells (cell-division) became well
understood. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century was it settled that the nucleus of the cell is also a
supremely important part; but finally in 1882 Flemming was able
to extend Virchow's aphorism to the nucleus also: omnis
nucleus e nucleo.
Since these discoveries our knowledge of the methods of
cell-division has much increased; and in the light of our
modern knowledge of these matters there is nothing in all
nature more marvellous than the regular orderly way in which
cells reproduce themselves according to fixed laws. Certain
cells in the developing embryo, for example, are early set
apart for a particular function or for building certain
structures, and thereafter are never diverted from this duty so
as to do a different work or produce a different kind of
structure. In the young embryo certain structures arise at
certain predestined times in particular places, and only there
and out of these cells alone. As to why it should be so,
we cannot tell, save as the result of deliberate design and as
an expression of the order-loving mind of the God of nature. In
the words of one of the greatest of modern authorities, "We
still do not know why a certain cell becomes a gland-cell,
another a gangleon-cell; why one cell gives rise to smooth
muscle-fiber, while a neighbor forms voluntary muscle.... It is
daily becoming more apparent that epigenesis with the three
layers of the germ furnishes no explanation of developmental
phenomena."[11]
In accordance with the general principle of a division of
labor, certain cells become early set apart to particular
functions, and in accordance with the varying demands of these
functions the developing cells may become greatly changed in
form and in vital characteristics. That is, one cell
specializes, let us say, in secretion, another in
contractility, another in receiving and carrying stimuli, etc.
In this way we will have the gland-cell, the muscle-cell, and
the nerve-cell, each cell destined to produce one of these
organs developing others "after its kind," the result being
that it is soon surrounded with numerous companions doing a
similar work, making up in this way a particular tissue or
organ--gland, muscle, or nerve--which in the aggregate has for
its function the work of the particular cells composing it.
But the important thing for us to remember in this connection
is that when cells once become thus differentiated off and
dedicated to any particular function, they can never grow or
develop into any distinctly different type of cell with other
and different functions. It is true that through pathologic
degeneration the form and even the function of cells may become
greatly changed; but never does it amount to a complete
metamorphosis or complete transformation into another
distinctly different type.
This is a very important principle, and it contains so many
lessons for us bearing on the philosophy of life in general
that it may be allowable to establish this fact by several
somewhat lengthy quotations from standard authorities.
The first will be from one of the highest authorities on
embryology, Charles Sedgwick Minot, of Harvard:
"In accordance with this law [of differentiation] we encounter
no instances, either in normal or pathological
development, of the transformation of a cell of one kind of
tissue into a cell of another kind of tissue; and further we
encounter no instances of a differentiated cell being
transformed back into an undifferentiated cell of the embryonic
type with varied potentialities."[12]
Again, we have the following from one of the foremost
pathologists, as to the strict and rather narrow limits of even
pathologic change:
"Epithelium and gland cells ... never become converted into
bone or cartilage, or vice versa; while, again, it may be laid
down that among epiblastic and hypoblastic tissues, on the one
hand, and mesoblastic tissues on the other, there is no new
development or metaplasia of the most highly specialized
tissues from less specialized tissues; a simple epithelium
cannot in the vertebrate give rise to more complex glandular
tissue, or to nerve cells; in regeneration of epithelium there
is no new formation of hair roots or cutaneous glands. The
cells of white fibrous connective tissue have not been seen to
form striated or even non-striated muscle."[13]
As implied by these quotations, a constant and progressive
differentiation of cells prevails in the developing embryo; and
when complete, certain groups of cells act as specialists in
doing only certain kinds of work for the body. These cells
maintain their specific characters in a very remarkable degree
under normal conditions. Under various abnormal conditions,
however, these cells may become modified as to functions, so
that cells or tissues of one type may assume more or less
completely the characters of another type. "But," as a very
high authority declares, "the limitations in this change in
type are strictly drawn, so that one type can assume only the
characters of another which is closely related to it. This
change of one form of closely related tissue into another is
called metaplasia....
"When differentiation has advanced so that such distinct types
of tissue have been formed as connective tissue, epithelium,
muscle, nerve, these do not again merge through metaplasia.
There is no evidence that mesoblastic tissues can be converted
into those of the epiblastic or hypoblastic type, or vice
versa."[14]
This modification of function among the cells which sometimes
goes on in the developing embryo, or under pathologic
conditions, is very closely analogous to the variation which
goes on among species of animals and plants. But, as we shall
see later, there is a well marked limit to this variation among
species, just as we see there is in the variations among the
cells. Practically the same general laws hold good in each
case.
If cells did not maintain their ancestral characters in a very
remarkable way, what would be the use of grafting a good kind
of fruit onto a stock of poorer quality? The very permanency of
the grafts thus produced is proof of the persistency with which
cells reproduce only "after their kind."
IV
How can we fail to see the bearings of these facts on the
doctrine of the transformation of species among ordinary plants
and animals, which are merely isolated and self-contained
groups of cells? Do not these facts constitute strong
presumptive evidence that among animals and plants, though
there may be variation in plenty within certain limits, perhaps
within even much wider limits than used to be thought possible,
yet among these distinct organisms, little and big, new forms
develop only after their ancestral type, in full accord with
the record given in the first chapter of the Bible?
But we are now prepared to examine in more detail the facts as
now known to modern science regarding "species" of plants and
animals.
____________________
[10]"Natural Law," Chapter X.
[11]Nature, May 23, 1901.
[12]Science, March 29, 1901, p. 490.
[13]J.G. Adami, "Principles of Pathology," pp. 641-642.
[14]Delafield and Prudden, "Text-Book of Pathology," pp. 62,
63.
I
We have seen that there is no way to account for the origin of
matter, of energy, or of life, except by postulating a real
Creation.
We have seen that cells continue to maintain their identity,
and reproduce only "after their kind."
We must now deal with the higher forms of cell aggregates,
which we call plants and animals. It has long been held that
these at least are mutable, that one kind of plant or of animal
may in the course of ages be transformed into a distinctly
different type; and of late years there has accumulated a very
voluminous literature dealing with the various intricacies of
this problem of the origin of species. How can we deal with
such a large subject in a brief way? It seems best to confine
our attention in this chapter to an attempt to answer the
question, What is a species? and are "species" natural groups
clearly delimited by nature?
II
The term "species" was at first used very loosely by
scientific writers. It meant very little more than our vague
word kind does at the present time. Not until the time
of Linnæus (1707-1778) did the term acquire a definite
and precise meaning. The aphorism of the great botanist,
"species tot sunt diversæ quot diversæ
formæ ab initio sunt creatæ"--"just so many
species are to be reckoned as there were forms created in the
beginning,"--was at least an attempt to use the term in a
well-defined sense. Of course, this definition assumed the
"fixity" of species; but with the wide prevalence of the views
of Darwin and his followers the term "species" has fallen into
disrepute, and is now regarded by many as only an artificial
rank in classification corresponding to no objective reality in
the natural world. Some writers, as Lankester, have found so
much fault with the term as to urge its complete abandonment in
scientific literature. This is logical enough from the
standpoint of Darwinism; for if the latter be true there ought
indeed to be such a swamping of every incipient "species" as to
make one kind blend with others all around it in the
classification series.
But since the term has by no means been discarded, we must
endeavor to determine the sense in which it continues to be
used in good scientific literature.
"A species," says Huxley, "is the smallest group to which
distinct and invariable characters can be assigned." The
Standard Dictionary says that the term is used for "a
classificatory group of animals or plants subordinate to a
genus, and having members that differ among themselves only in
minor details of proportion and color, and are capable of
fertile interbreeding indefinitely."
The latter authority also adds:
"In the kingdoms of organic nature species is founded on
identity of form and structure, and specifically characterized
by the power of the individuals to produce beings like
themselves, who are in turn productive."
To put the matter still more definitely before the reader, we
quote the following from a well-known scientist whose writings
on the subject of evolution have had a wide circulation:
"There are two bases on which species may be founded. Species
may be based on form, morphological species; or they may
be based on reproductive functions, physiological
species. By the one method a certain amount of difference of
form, structure, and habit, constitutes species; according to
the other, if the two kinds breed freely with each other and
the offspring is indefinitely fertile, the kinds are called
varieties, but if they do not they are called species."[15]
This author adds that this physiological test, as to whether
or not the kinds are cross fertile, "is regarded as a most
important test of true species, as contrasted with varieties or
races."
III
When we look at the matter in this light, it is very evident
that there are multitudes of long recognized specific
distinctions that ought to be discarded. For instance, there
are some twenty odd "species" of wild pigs scattered over the
Old World, which Flower and Lydekker assure us would probably
"breed freely together."[16] The yak and the zebu of India, and
the bison of America, would on this basis have to be
surrendered, for it is well known that they will all breed
freely with the common domestic cattle, as well as with one
another. Perhaps all or nearly all of the dozen or more
"species" of the genus Bos would thus be included
together. All of the dogs, wolves, and others of the
Canidæ might thus be considered as fundamentally a
unit. The cats (Felidæ) are well known to breed
freely together, Karl Hagënbeck of Hamburg having crossed
lions and tigers as well as others of the family. Practically
all of the bears have been crossed repeatedly, and the progeny
of these and other crosses are quite familiar sights at the
London Zoölogical Gardens. Among the lower forms of life
even more surprising results have been attained by Thomas Hunt
Morgan and others.
It would, however, be a very hasty conclusion to say on the
basis of these facts that there are no natural limitations to
groups of animals and plants. But we are entirely warranted in
concluding from these facts that in very many cases, perhaps in
most, our system of taxonomic classification of animals and
plants has gone altogether too far, and that scientists have
erected specific distinctions which are wholly uncalled for and
which confuse and obscure the main issues of the species
problem. Among the workers in botany and in every department of
zoölogy there have always been the "splitters" and the
"lumpers," as they are familiarly called; the former insisting
on the most minute distinctions between their "species," thus
multiplying them; the latter being more liberal and tending to
diminish the number of species in any given group. For a
generation or more in the recent past the "splitters" had
things pretty much their own way; but of late there is a
growing tendency to frown down the mania for creating new
names. Even yet it is with the utmost reluctance that long
established specific distinctions are surrendered, as is
illustrated in the case of the mammoth, which is acknowledged
by some of the very best authorities to be really
indistinguishable from the modern Asiatic elephant. Several
fossil bears were long listed in scientific books; but they are
all acknowledged now to be identical with the modern grizzly,
and as we have already intimated all the modern ones ought to
be put together. These modern rationalizing methods have made
but a slight impression on the vast complex of the fossil
plants and animals, affecting the names of only a few of the
larger and better known forms. In the realm of invertebrate
palæontology, however, the "splitters" are still holding
high carnival, in spite of the efforts of some very prominent
scientists in the opposite direction. For palæontologists
still follow the irrational course of inventing a new name,
specific or even generic, for a form that happens to be found
in a kind of rock widely separated as to "age" from the other
beds where similar forms are accustomed to be found. As Angelo
Heilprin expresses it, "It is practically certain that numerous
forms of life, exhibiting no distinctive characters of their
own, are constituted into distinct species for no other
reason than that they occur in formations widely separated from
those holding their nearest kin."[17]
As a result of these methods this same author declares: "It is
by no means improbable that many of the older genera,
now recognized as distinct by reason of our imperfect knowledge
concerning their true relationships, have in reality
representatives living in the modern seas."[18]
But the situation is very little better when we come to deal
with plants and animals of our modern world. Because, with the
many thousands of students of natural science all over the
world, each anxious to get into print as the discoverer of some
new form, the systematists have a dead weight of names on their
hands that by a rational and enlightened revision could
doubtless be reduced to but a fraction of their present
disheartening array. For as the result of the extensive
breeding experiments now being carried on under the study of
what is called Mendelism (a term that will be explained in the
next chapter), it has been found that great numbers of the
"species" of the systematists or classificationists will not
stand the physiological test of breeding, that is, they are
found to breed freely together according to the Mendelian Law.
As William Bateson remarks:
"We may even be certain that numbers of excellent species
recognized by entomologists or ornithologists, for example,
would, if subjected to breeding tests, be immediately proved to
be analytical varieties, differing from each other
merely in the presence or absence of definite factors."[19]
The following from David Starr Jordan, the leading American
authority on fishes, will serve to show how numerous have been
the new names invented in recent years, all tending further to
confuse and complicate the problem of what is a species:
"In our fresh-water fishes, each species on an average has
been described as new from three to four times, on
account of minor variations, real or supposed. In Europe, where
the fishes have been studied longer and by more different men,
upwards of six or eight nominal species have been described for
each one that is now considered distinct."[20]
And again:
"Thus the common Channel Catfish of our rivers has been
described as a new species not less than twenty-five
times, on account of differences real or imaginary, but
comparatively trifling in value."[21]
Perhaps the reader will tolerate another somewhat long
quotation because of the light which it sheds on this whole
problem.
"Some years ago we had a parasite of a very destructive aphid
down in our books as Lysiphlebus tritici. In carrying
out our investigations it became necessary to find out whether
this parasite had more than a single host insect, and whether
it could develop in more than one species of aphid. To this
end, recently emerged males and females were allowed to pair,
after which the female oviposited in several species of aphids.
Both parents were then killed and preserved and all of their
progeny not used in further experiments were also preserved,
and thus entire broods or families were kept together. In this
way females were reared out of one host species and allowed to
oviposit in others, until, often after several hosts had been
employed, it would be bred back into the species whence it
first originated. In all cases the host was reared from the
moment of birth, while with the parasite both parents and
offspring were kept together.
"The result of this little fragment of work was to send two
genera and fourteen species to the cemetery--you may call
it Mt. Synonym Cemetery, if you choose--while the insect
involved is now Aphidius testaceipes. The systematist
who studies only dried corpses will soon be out of date."[22]
IV
Now all this is not given to intimate that there is no
scientific justification for the term "species," but to make
plain to my non-professional readers what every well-informed
biologist already knows, namely, that at the present time the
"species question" is still in a very unsatisfactory state. The
facts given above would strongly suggest that there probably is
indeed such a thing as a species, in the sense assigned by
Linnæus, who as we have seen wished to make it a
designation covering all the descendants of each distinct kind
originally created. But this original aim of Linnæus is
to-day not merely ignored but treated with lofty contempt; for
according to the prevailing theories of evolution, all the
manifold diversities of life in our modern world have come
about gradually as the result of a slow development by natural
process, and hence it would be vain beyond measure to attempt
to determine the limits of a "species" in the sense understood
by Linnæus.
But we may conclude, from the facts presented above, that if
there is such a naturally delimited group as a "species" in the
Linnæan sense of the word, it by no means coincides with
what now passes under this name, but might include many
so-called species, often a whole genus, or even several.
With this in mind, we must pass on to consider the next step
in our study, as to whether new "species" are now coming into
being in our modern world under scientific observation, either
natural or artificial.
____________________
[15]Joseph Le Conte, "Evolution and Religious Thought," p.
233.
[16]"Mammals Living and Extinct," pp. 284-285.
[17]"Geographical and Geological Distribution of Animals," pp.
183, 184.
[18]Id., pp. 207, 208.
[19]"Mendel's Principles of Heredity," p. 284, 1909.
[20]"Science Sketches," p. 99.
[21]"Science Sketches," p. 96.
[22]F.M. Webster, of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, in
Science, April 12, 1912, p. 565.
"Had Mendel's work come into the hands of Darwin, it is not
too much to say that the history of the development of
evolutionary philosophy would have been very different from
that which we have witnessed."[23]
I
From the latter part of the eighteenth century, attempts were
continually being made to explain the origin of all organic
forms by some system of development or evolution. Buffon had
dwelt on the modifications directly induced by the environment.
Lamarck had made much use of this idea, claiming that such
modifications were transmitted to posterity, and claiming the
same for the structural changes produced by use and disuse.
Lamarck's work did not become at all popular while he lived,
chiefly through the overpowering influence of Baron Cuvier, who
had an equally fantastic scheme of his own, which may well be
termed a burlesque on Creation and in which an extreme fixity
of "species" was a cardinal doctrine. Erasmus Darwin and Robert
Chambers in England also tried to make a theory of evolution
believable; though their efforts were but little more
successful in gaining the ear of the world.
But to all that had gone before Charles Darwin and A.R.
Wallace (1858) added the idea of "natural selection," or "the
struggle for existence," to use the respective terms coined by
each of these authors, as the chief means by which the effects
of variation are accumulated and perpetuated so as to build up
the modern complexities of the plant and animal kingdoms.
Partly because it was a psychological moment, from the fact
that the uniformitarian geology of Lyell with its graded
advance of existences from age to age seemed absolutely to
demand some evolutionary explanation; partly because artificial
selection was a familiar idea of proved value in selective
breeding, and "natural selection" seemed an exact parallel
carried on by nature in the direction of continual improvement;
but perhaps more largely because the abstract idea of "natural
selection" involved so many intricate separate concepts that
for nearly a generation scarcely two naturalists in the world
could state the whole problem of the theory exactly alike;--on
all these accounts the theory of natural selection, or of the
"survival of the fittest," to use the phrase of Herbert
Spencer, became in the latter decades of the nineteenth century
well-nigh universal.
But about 1887 a faction or school arose who criticized the
main idea of Darwin and Wallace and fell back on the Lamarckian
factor of the transmission of acquired characters as really the
essential cause of the process of evolution. Herbert Spencer,
E.D. Cope and others did much to criticize natural selection as
inadequate to do what was attributed to it, dwelling on the
importance of the transmission of acquired characters. Spencer
even went so far as to declare, "either there has been
inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no
evolution." These Neo-Lamarckians argued that natural selection
alone can neither explain the origin of varieties, nor the
first steps in the slow advance toward "usefulness." An organ
must be already useful before natural selection can take hold
of it to improve it. Selection cannot make a thing useful to
start with, but only (possibly) make more useful what already
exists. Until the newly formed buds of developing limbs or
organs became decidedly "useful" to the individual or the
species, would they not be in the way, merely so many
hindrances, to be removed by natural selection instead of being
preserved and improved? But, in this view of the matter, they
argued, what single organ of any species would there be that
must not thus have appeared long before it was wanted?
Or to use the pungent words quoted with approval by Hugo de
Vries at the end of his "Species and Varieties" (pp. 825, 826),
"Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but
it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."
This side of the argument is dwelt upon at some length by
Alex. Graham Bell, as reported in a recent interview. He
says:
"Natural selection does not and cannot produce new species or
varieties or cause modifications of living organisms to come
into existence. On the contrary, its sole function is to
prevent evolution. In its action it is destructive merely,--not
constructive,--causing death and extinction, not life and
progression. Death cannot produce life; and though natural
selection may produce the death of the unfit, it cannot produce
the fit, far less evolve the fittest. It may permit the fit to
survive by not killing them off, if they are already in
existence; but it does not bring them into being, or produce
improvement in them after they have once appeared."[24]
Opposing these Neo-Lamarckians were such prominent scientists
as August Weismann, A.R. Wallace, E. Ray Lankester, who
strenuously opposed the idea that "acquired characters," or
more precisely parental experience, are ever
transmissible. In the subsequent years the greatest variety of
experimental tests have been applied to secure the hereditary
transmission of any sort of such acquired characters, with
uniformly negative results. One of the most elaborate of these
experiments was conducted by a German botanist, who
transplanted 2,500 different kinds of mountain plants to the
lowlands, where he studied them for several years alongside
their relatives, natives of these lowlands. He found that their
mountain environment had made absolutely no permanent change in
their structures or habits, which soon conformed exactly with
those of their relatives which had lived in the lowland
environment for centuries. Many similar efforts have been made
to confirm this doctrine of the transmission of acquired
characters; but their universal failure is like that of
mechanics in trying to invent perpetual motion.
Thomas Hunt Morgan sums up the present situation in the
following words: "To-day the theory has few followers among
trained investigators, but it still has a popular vogue that is
wide-spread and vociferous." And we may add that the extent of
its spread is directly proportioned to the need felt for this
doctrine as a support of the theory of evolution, while the
vociferance of its advocates is inversely proportioned to the
evidence in its support.
As a result of extensive modern experiments and discussion,
biologists have grown very cautious, and are by no means so
positive as they were twenty years ago in affirming just
how species have come into existence. Echoes of this old
controversy between the two leading schools of biologists are
occasionally heard; but the enthusiasm with which they set out
a half century ago to solve the riddle of plant and animal life
has largely given way to a purpose to discard speculation and
patiently to observe and record actual facts. For with natural
selection discredited in the house of its friends, and
Lamarckianism under grave suspicion from want of a single well
authenticated example, it is hard to see what there is left of
the biological doctrine that has so dominated scientific
thought for a half century. If each of these opposed schools of
scientists are right in what they deny, the whole
theoretical foundation for the origin of new kinds of animals
and plants is swept away,--absolutely gone. For if an
individual really cannot transmit what he has acquired in his
lifetime, how can he transmit what he has not got himself, and
what none of his ancestors ever had? And if natural selection
cannot start a single organ of a single type, what is the use
of discussing its supposed ability to improve them after the
machinery is all built?
II
Such was the general condition of theoretical biology about
the beginning of the present century. In the meantime those who
were dealing with the empyrical or experimental side of these
problems were seeking for the causes of and the rules for
variation. All living things vary from one generation to
another; the question was, Why do they vary? and do these
variations really represent new characters comparable to new
species in the making? or are they, so to speak, but an elastic
reaction of the internal vital elasticity of the organism, all
the while latent and only seeking a favorable expression, to
return again under other conditions to the former type?
The effort to reduce these variations to law and system was
pursued by thousands of investigators, with varying but at all
times perplexing and disappointing results. But in the year
1900 the scientific world awoke to the surprising fact that a
patient obscure investigator had already solved most of the
puzzles of variation and heredity some thirty-five years
before. Gregor Mendel, born a peasant boy, trained as a monk,
and afterwards appointed Abbot of Brünn, had in the year
1865 published the results of his experiments in breeding,
which had been ignored or forgotten until rediscovered in 1900
by de Vries and two others simultaneously. From this point
Mendelism, as it is now called, has steadily gained ground,
until at the present time it can be said to be the dominating
conception among biologists the world over regarding the
problems of heredity.
Mendel worked chiefly with peas, crossing different varieties.
In his methods of investigation he differed from all previous
investigators in concentrating his attention upon a single pair
of alternative or contrasted characters at a time, and
observing how these alternative characters are transmitted.
Thus when he crossed a tall with a dwarf, giving attention to
this pair of contrasted characters alone, he found that all the
first hybrid generation were talls, with no dwarfs and no
intermediates. Accordingly he called the tall character
dominant, and the dwarf character recessive, and
a pair of contrasted characters which act in this way are now
called factors or sometimes called unit
characters. But on allowing these hybrids to
cross-fertilize one another in the usual way, Mendel found that
in the second generation of hybrids there were always three
talls to one dwarf out of every four. Further experiments
proved that these dwarfs of the second hybrid generation
always bred true, that is, one out of four; and that one
out of the remaining talls always bred true, making another
quarter of the total; while the remaining fifty per cent.
proved to be mixed tails, always acting as did the original
hybrids, splitting up in the next generation in the same
arithmetical proportion as before.
Accordingly, if we confine our study to the two contrasted
characters, tallness and dwarfness, we see that just three
kinds of peas exist, namely, dwarfs which breed true, talls
which breed true, and talls which always give the same definite
proportion of talls and dwarfs among their descendants.
Innumerable experiments which have since been made with other
pairs of characters have demonstrated that this same
mathematical proportion holds good throughout the whole world
of plants and animals;[25] and hence this astonishing result is
now called Mendel's Law, and is regarded as the most important
discovery in biology in several generations.
There are two distinct kinds of Andalusian fowls, one pure
bred black, the other pure bred white with slight dashes of
black here and there. When these are mated, no matter which
color is the father or the mother, the next or hybrid
generation are always a queer mixture of black and white called
by fanciers blue. When these blues are interbred, one-quarter
of their offspring will be white, which will prove to breed
true ever afterwards, one-quarter will be black that will breed
true, and fifty per cent. will be blue which will break up in
the next generation in the very same way as before. In this
case neither white nor black character is dominant, and
accordingly we have a blending of both in the first hybrid
generation.
In guinea pigs, black color has been found to be dominant over
white, rough coat over smooth coat, and short hair over long
hair. These remarkable results following from an experimental
trial of Mendelism have stimulated hosts of investigators in
all parts of the world, until now many varieties of plants and
animals have been studied for many successive generations,
already, building up a considerable literature dealing with the
subject.
Perhaps the most extensive and exact series of experiments
along this line have been carried on by Thomas Hunt Morgan and
his assistants, of Columbia University. For over five years
they have been breeding the wild fruit fly (Drosophila
ampelophila), during which time they have originated and
observed over a hundred and twenty-five new types that breed
true according to Mendel's laws. Every part of the body has
been affected by one or another of these mutations. The wings
have been shortened, or changed in shape, or made to disappear
entirely. The eyes have been changed in color or entirely
eliminated. And each of these wonderful variations was brought
about not gradually, but at a single step.
Professor Morgan grows justifiably sarcastic in contrasting
these demonstrated laboratory facts with the armchair theories
that have so long and so harmfully dominated biological
studies. A quotation from him will not be out of place at this
point.
"I may recall in this connection that wingless flies also
arose in our cultures by a single mutation. We used to be told
that wingless insects occurred on desert islands because those
insects that had the best developed wings had been blown out to
sea. Whether this is true or not, I will not pretend to say;
but at any rate wingless insects may also arise, not through a
slow process of elimination, but at a single step.... Formerly
we were taught that eyeless animals arose in caves. This case
shows that they may also arise suddenly in glass milk bottles,
by a change in a single factor."[26]
We need not be particularly concerned here with the
theoretical explanations of these facts offered in terms of the
microscopic or even the infra-microscopic components of the
germ cells. Morgan seems to make out a strong case for the
theory that the chromosomes found in the nucleus are the real
ultimate units that carry the hereditary factors. But he is
quite decided in the opinion that these hereditary factors are
fixed, and are not changed from generation to generation either
by environment or by selection.[27] The important thing for us
in this connection is to get a clear idea of the results
following from an application of Mendel's laws to the old, old
problem of the origin of species, incidentally noticing how the
theory associated with Darwin's name now looks in the light of
these new facts.
We have hitherto been considering the results worked out by
Mendel with but one pair of contrasted characters or factors.
But Mendel studied the relation of other characters of the pea,
and found among other results that smooth seeds are dominant to
wrinkled seeds, colored seeds dominant to white, yellow color
dominant to green, etc. But when a combination of two
factors in each parent are put into contrast by cross breeding,
two wholly original forms (as they seemed) were sometimes
produced, and it looked as if these new kinds were really
analogous to new species.
For example, he crossed tall yellow peas with dwarf green
peas, with the result that the first hybrid generation turned
out to be all tall yellows. However, in the second hybrid
generation they split up according to the law as already
stated, modified by the additional complication brought into
the problem by the additional pair of factors. For out of every
sixteen plants there were nine tall yellows, three dwarf
yellows, three tall greens, and one dwarf green. It
is evident that these tall greens and dwarf yellows are really
new forms; and further experiments proved that they can be
separated out or segregated and grown as pure forms which
thereafter breed true. Thus we have a very important result for
the breeder, for it enables him to work to a definite aim and
combine certain desirable characters into a single form.
The term mutation, as already intimated, has been given
to this process of producing new varieties in this way. The
kinds so produced are termed mutants, and at first they
were hailed by enthusiastic scientists as "elementary species."
De Vries in particular gave much publicity to this idea; for he
thought he had really produced a new kind comparable in every
respect to a true species as produced by nature among wild
plants. But the enthusiasm with which this applied result of
Mendel's Law was at first hailed by biologists has gradually
subsided; for it has been found that though these new forms
will breed true under certain conditions, they are nevertheless
cross-fertile with the original forms, and thus the
circle can be completed back again by a return to the
parent form, from which the new "species" can again be produced
at will with the same mathematical exactness as before.
III
Where then are we?
Clearly we have not really produced any new species in any
correct sense of the word. If we have produced new forms that
breed true and that are seemingly just as deserving of the rank
of distinct species as many now listed in scientific books, it
only shows that our lists are sadly at fault, and that they are
not all species that are called species. These experiments
merely indicate that the parent form possesses more
potential characters than it can give expression to in a single
individual form, some of them being necessarily latent or
hidden, and that when these latent ones show themselves they
must do so at the expense of others which become latent or
hidden in their turn. This vital elasticity, as it may
be termed, or the vital rebound under definite conditions, is
indeed a prime characteristic of the species just as it is of
the individual; but like that of the individual the vital
elasticity of the species is strictly bounded by comparatively
narrow limits beyond which we have never seen a single type
pass under either natural or artificial conditions. Mutations
can be made according to Mendel's Law; but when we have made
them once we can always be sure of producing the very same
mutants again in the very same way, as surely as we produce
a definite chemical compound; and when we have made it we
can always resolve it at will back into its original form,
just as we can a chemical compound. And so, where is the
evolution? or how do these facts throw any light on the problem
of the origin of species, any more than chemical compounds
throw light on the origin of the elements? Obviously in biology
as in chemistry we are only working in a circle, merely marking
time.
And the bearing of these facts on the other problem of the
transmission of acquired characters is quite obvious. Mendelism
provides no place for any such transmission. Mendel's Law is
sometimes called the law of alternative inheritance,
thus embodying in its name the thought that offspring may show
the characters possessed by one parent or by the other, but
that it cannot develop any characters whatever which were not
manifest or latent in the ancestry. Changes in the environment
during the embryonic stage, it is true, seem sometimes to be
registered in the growing form; but it has never yet been
proved that these induced changes can ever amount to a unit
character or genetic factor that will maintain itself and
segregate as a distinct factor after hybridization. Ancestry
alone furnishes the material for the factor, and no amount of
induced change can get itself registered in the organism so as
to come into this charmed circle of ancestral characters which
alone seem to be passed on to posterity.
A quotation from Bateson ought to set this point at rest:
"The essence of the Mendelian principle is very easily
expressed. It is, first, that in great measure the properties
of organisms are due to the presence of distinct, detachable
elements [factors], separately transmitted in heredity; and
secondly, that the parent cannot pass on to offspring an
element, and consequently the corresponding property, which it
does not itself possess."[28]
Heredity we now see is a method of analysis, and the facts
brought to light by Mendelism help us very much toward an
understanding of living matter. Especially does it help us to
understand the complexity underlying the facts of heredity,
which until now have seemed so strange and capricious. As
Professor Punnett of Cambridge remarks:
"Constitutional differences of a radical nature may be
concealed beneath an apparent identity of external form. Purple
sweet peas from the same pod, indistinguishable in appearance
and of identical ancestry, may yet be fundamentally different
in their constitution. From one may come purples, reds, and
whites; from another only purples and reds; from another
purples and whites alone; whilst a fourth will breed true to
purple. Any method of investigation which fails to take account
of the radical differences of constitution which may underlie
external similarity, must necessarily be doomed to failure.
Conversely, we realize to-day that individuals identical in
constitution may yet have an entirely different ancestral
history. From the cross between two fowls with rose and pea
combs, each of irreproachable pedigree for generations, come
single combs in the second generation, and these singles are
precisely similar in their behavior to singles bred from
strains of unblemished ancestry. In the ancestry of the one
is to be found no single over a long series of years; in the
ancestry of the other nothing but singles occurred. The
creature of given constitution may often be built up in many
ways, but once formed it will behave like others of the same
constitution."[29]
IV
Vanished at last are the old theories of gradual changes in
species perpetuated and accumulated by natural selection until
at last wholly new forms have in this way been produced. True
variations are now seen to be confined within well-marked and
rather narrow limits, within which ordinary variations may
occur, perhaps induced by environment. These fluctuating
variations grade off into one another on all sides, and their
differences can be plotted on a frequency curve; but the
very important thing for us to remember is that these
fluctuating variations cannot be transmitted. Beyond
these fluctuating variations come the unit characters or
factors, which are distinct from each other, or
"discontinuous," to use the technical term, and which therefore
cannot be plotted on a frequency curve. These factors
are not modified in the least by the environment, and their
peculiarities are faithfully transmitted in heredity with all
the precision of chemical law. But even these factors are all
within the bounds of the species. There is not a shred of
scientific evidence that either natural or artificial devices
have originated a single genetic factor that was not all the
time potentially latent in the ancestry, capable of being
produced at will by the proper combination.
It is a universal law of living things that all forms left to
themselves tend to degenerate. The necessity for continuous
artificial selection in the sugar beet, in Sea Island cotton,
in corn, in Jersey and Holstein cattle, in trotting horses,
proves this universal tendency to degenerate.[30] Natural
selection in a somewhat similar way tends to postpone this
degeneracy by killing off the "unfit," but selection either
artificial or natural cannot originate anything new, and its
results are here displayed merely among the small fluctuating
variations mentioned above. Even among the real genetic factors
it may show itself by allowing some to survive alone; but as no
combination of diverse factors can originate anything really
new, its field for operation among these factors is extremely
limited. Among species also it is operative, killing off some
and allowing others to survive. But neither among fluctuations,
among factors, nor yet among species can selection originate
anything new.
Nor is there any other method known to modern science by means
of which new factors can be originated which were not
potentially latent in the ancestry. The much heralded new
"species" of de Vries and others are now known to be merely new
factors cropping out;[31] for though they remain constant and
breed true, they obey Mendel's Law when crossed with their
parental forms, and hence are merely the result of some new
combination of factors which can be reproduced at will by using
the same method of combination and segregation. The real
scientific test for any form supposed to be a new "species"
would be twofold: (1) to show that some new character had been
added which no ancestor ever possessed; and (2) to show that
this new character will breed true under all circumstances of
hybridization and not merely segregate as a unit character or
mere analytic variety after hybridization. It is almost
superfluous to say that no "new species" originating in modern
times has ever justified itself under these tests.
In conclusion it may be remarked that biologists do not claim
to have solved all the problems connected with heredity and
variation. But the general results taught us by Mendelism are
now established beyond controversy. Led by the German
biologists, the leading scientists of the world had already
acknowledged that "pure" Darwinism or natural selection cannot
explain the origin of new organs or new forms. And now
Mendelism destroys the other supposed foundation for biological
evolution, by showing that small variations cannot be
accumulated into large differences equal in value to a unit
character or a new species. Thus the whole foundation of
biological evolution has been completely undermined by these
new discoveries; and were it not for the wide-spread credence
the evolutionary theory has already received, and the
intellectual momentum it has acquired tending to carry it on by
its inertia into the future, it could be only a very short time
now before the elaborate treatises attempting to orientate with
it all the facts of religion and history would have to be
consigned to the shelves labeled, "Of Historic Interest." For
as Bateson remarked in his recent address as President before
the British Association at Melbourne, Australia, the new
knowledge of heredity shows that whatever evolution there is
occurs by loss of factors and not by gain, and that in this way
the progress of science is "destroying much that till lately
passed for gospel."[32]
V
Let us sum up the situation. We began this chapter with the
question, Have new kinds of plants and animals originated in
modern times comparable in all essential respects with the idea
of true species?
The answer of modern science is reluctantly obtained, but it
is a negative. De Vries and others have indeed originated new
kinds that were loudly hailed as new species, and are doubtless
as deserving of specific rank as many already listed for years
in the treatises of specialists. Indeed there is every reason
to believe that almost countless numbers of our taxonomic
species have originated from common ancestral originals. But as
these so-called species are now known to be freely or
moderately cross fertile with other related species, their
hybrids following the ordinary laws of Mendelian inheritance,
we see that they are not true species but mere analytic
varieties.
In short, we now know that our taxonomic classifications have
been marked off on altogether too narrow lines. This has tended
greatly to confuse the question at issue. But from our enlarged
views of the laws and nature of heredity and variation, as well
as from the original intent of the term species as
defined by the great scientist who originated it, the verdict
of an impartial investigator must be that we have never seen a
new species originate by any natural or artificial method since
the dawn of scientific observation.
Here again we find the record of Creation confirmed; for the
failure of the thousands of modern investigators to originate
genuine new species proves that in this respect also Creation
is not now going on. And all the analogies from the origin of
matter, of energy, of life, and from the laws of the
reproduction of cells, indicate that we have at last found rock
bottom truth regarding the vexed question of the origin of
species. So far as science can observe and record, each living
thing on earth, in air, in water, reproduces "after its
kind."
____________________
[23]William Bateson, "Mendel's Principles of Heredity," p.
316.
[24]World's Work, December, 1913, p. 177.
[25]When dealing with only a few individual cases, we do not
always find them to come out in such exact proportion; but when
the number of examples is large, the proportion is so close to
these figures that the exceptions can be entirely neglected as
probably due to error of some kind.
[26]"A Critique of the Theory of Evolution," p. 67.
[27]In human beings it has been found that the effects of
alcoholism and of syphilis are indeed transmitted according to
Mendelian law, being the two solitary examples of diseased
conditions that are thus transmitted. But they are so plainly
pathologic phenomena that there is little temptation for the
advocates of Lamarckianism to use them as proofs of their
theory.
[28]Scientific American Sup., January 3, 1914.
[29]Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XVIII, p. 119.
[30]The following represents the consensus of scientific
opinion regarding the lessons to be drawn from the phenomena of
our improved races of domesticated plants and animals:
"One need not be a pessimist to assert the actual evidence thus far obtained indicates that the supposed progress made in the improvement of domesticated animals and plants is nothing more than the sorting out of pure lines, and thus represents no advancement."--Prof. L.B. Walton, Science, April 3, 1914.
[31]Some of our leading biologists are now disposed to grow somewhat humorous when speaking of this mutation theory of de Vries, as may be illustrated by the following:
"The mutation theory of de Vries appears accordingly to lag useless on the biological stage, and may apparently be now relegated to the limbo of discarded hypotheses.... The present refutation has been undertaken in the interest of biological progress in this country. It is now high time, so far as the so-called mutation hypothesis, based on the conduct of the evening primrose in cultures, is concerned, that the younger generation of biologists should take heed lest the primrose path of dalliance lead them imperceptibly into the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire."--Prof. Edw. C. Jeffrey (Harvard), in Science, April 3, 1914.
[32]In commenting on these views of Bateson, Prof. S.C. Holmes, of the University of California, well speaks of them as "an illustration of the bankruptcy of present evolutionary theory."--Science, September 3, 1915.
I
In all the previous chapters I have not been giving any very
new facts or any discoveries of my own. True, my conclusions
from the facts may seem novel; but in general I have been
giving merely facts which are almost universally acknowledged
by educated men. The conservation laws of matter and of energy,
the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, the
laws governing cell multiplication, are matters of common
knowledge and will be found in the appropriate college
text-books throughout the civilized world. Even the facts which
I have presented regarding variation and heredity are admitted
in one way or another by practically all biologists. But in
following our general subject into the field of geology, I
shall be obliged to present some comprehensive truths and
general conclusions which are not so widely acknowledged,
because only recently brought to light. However, as these facts
and conclusions may seem very new and strange to many, I shall
endeavor to build up my argument wholly on the recorded
observations of the very highest authorities rather than on my
own unsupported testimony; though for the sake of brevity I
shall be obliged to refer the reader to my "Fundamentals of
Geology" (1913) for some of the details.
One of the great outstanding ideas of geology as usually
taught is that life has been on the globe for many millions of
years, that in fact there has been a graded succession of
different types of life in a well defined invariable order,
from the lower and more generalized to the higher and more
specialized. Quite obviously this succession of life was
antagonistic to the former views of a literal Creation; and
only on this supposed fact as an outline has the modern theory
of biological evolution been built up. For if geology cannot
furnish the most unquestionable proof that life has occurred in
a very definite and invariable order, what is the use of
talking about the development of one form of life into another
by a gradual process of evolution?
One of the highest scientific authorities in America, Prof.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, of Columbia University, has recently said,
"The direct evidence furnished by fossil remains is by all odds
the strongest evidence that we have in favor of organic evolution."[33] Accordingly we purpose to examine carefully
what this by all odds "strongest evidence" is like.
II
As with some of the other facts with which we have had to deal
in previous chapters, a correct understanding of the questions
involved can best be obtained by examining the history of the
development of the science.
The first man with whom we need to concern ourselves is A.G.
Werner, a teacher of mineralogy in the University of Freiberg,
Germany. For three hundred years his ancestors had been
connected with mining work, and he, though possessing little
general education, knew about all that was then known regarding
mineralogy and petrology. He wrote no books; but by his
enthusiastic teaching he gathered as students and sent out as
evangelists hundreds of devoted young scientists who rapidly
spread his theories through all the countries of Europe.
"Unfortunately," says Zittel, "Werner's field observations
were limited to a small district, the Erz Mountains and the
neighboring parts of Saxony and Bohemia. And his chronological
scheme of formations was founded on the mode of occurrence of
the rocks within these narrow confines."[34]
Werner had found the granites, limestones, sandstones,
schists, etc., occurring in a certain relative order in his
native country; and he drew the very remarkable conclusion that
this was the normal order in which these various rocks
would invariably be found in all parts of the world, on the
theory that this was the order in which these different rocks
had been formed in the beginning, great layers of these
different rocks having originally been spread completely around
the globe one outside another like the coats of an onion. With
this as a major premise, it is not surprising that he and his
enthusiastic disciples "were as certain of the origin and
sequence of the rocks as if they had been present at the
formation of the earth's crust."[35]
The amusement with which this onion-coat theory is now
regarded is hardly appropriate in view of its universal vogue
among geologists about the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and in view of the further fact that a very similar and only
slightly modified substitute theory has been universally taught
for three-quarters of a century and still prevails. The
modern form of the theory substitutes onion-coats of
fossiliferous rocks for onion-coats of mineral and lithological
characters; and a brief consideration of this theory is now in
order.
About the time that various geologists here and there were
finding rocks in positions that could not be explained in terms
of Werner's theory, William Smith (1769-1839) in England and
the great Baron Cuvier (1769-1832) in France found
characteristic fossils occurring in various strata; and under
their teachings it was not long before the fossils were
considered the best guide in determining the relative sequence
of the rocks. The familiar idea of world-enveloping strata as
representing successive ages was not discarded; but instead of
Werner's successive ages of limestone making, sandstone making,
etc., these new investigators taught that there were successive
ages of invertebrates, fishes, reptiles, and mammals, these
creatures having registered their existence in rocky strata
which thus by hypothesis completely encircled the globe one
outside another.
It is true that early in the nineteenth century Sir Charles
Lyell and others tried to disclaim this absurd and unscientific
inheritance from Werner's onion-coats; but modern geology has
never yet got rid of its essential and its chief characteristic
idea, for all our text-books still speak of various successive
ages when only certain types of life prevailed all over the
globe. Hence it is that Herbert Spencer caustically
remarks: "Though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit
is traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the
conclusions of its antagonists."[36] Hence it is that Whewell,
in his "History of the Inductive Sciences," refuses to
acknowledge that in geology any real advance has yet been made
toward a stable science like those of astronomy, physics, and
chemistry. "We hardly know," he says, "whether the progress is
begun. The history of physical astronomy almost commences with
Newton, and few persons will venture to assert that the Newton
of geology has yet appeared."[37] Hence it is that T.H. Huxley
declares, "In the present condition of our knowledge and of
our methods, one verdict,--'not proven and not
provable'--must be recorded against all grand hypotheses of
the palæontologist respecting the general succession of
life on the globe."[38] And hence it is that Sir Henry H.
Howorth, a member of the British House of Commons and the
author of three exhaustive works on the Glacial theory,
declares, "It is a singular and notable fact, that while most
other branches of science have emancipated themselves from the
trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of geology
still remains imprisoned in a priori theories."[39]
And thus the matter remains even to-day, in this second decade
of the twentieth century. Geology has never yet been
regenerated, as have all the other sciences, by being
delivered from the caprice of subjective speculations and a
priori theories and being placed on the secure basis of
objective and demonstrable fact, in accordance with the
principles of that inductive method of investigation which was
instituted by Bacon and which has become so far universal in
the other sciences that it is everywhere known as the
scientific method. In accordance with this method, theories in
all the other sciences are always kept well subordinated to
facts; and whenever unequivocal facts are found manifestly
contradicting a theory no matter how venerable, the theory must
go to make way for the facts. In other words, the theoretical
parts of the various other sciences are always kept revised
from time to time, to keep them in line with the new
discoveries that have been made. There has been no lack of
astonishing discoveries of new facts in geology during the past
half century or so, while all the other sciences have been
making such astonishing progress. But for over seventy five
years geology has not made a single advance movement in its
theoretical aspects; indeed, in all its important general
principles it has scarcely changed in a hundred years. I shall
leave it to the reader to judge whether this is a case of
almost miraculous perfection from the beginning, or of arrested
development.
III
Of the three general postulates or a priori
assumptions of this curiously out-of-date mediæval
science, namely, (1) Uniformity, (2) the Cooling globe theory,
and (3) the theory of the Successive Ages, the first two have
already been examined and found wanting by other investigators,
and have been allowed to lapse into a sort of honored disuse,
though their memory is still reverently cherished in all the
text-books of the science. The "Challenger" Expedition
dissipated most of the myths that had long been taught
regarding the deep waters of the ocean; and Professor Suess has
disposed of the closely related myth about the coasts of the
continents being constantly on the seesaw up and down. These
two discoveries, with others that might be mentioned, dispose
of Lyell's theory of uniformity. Lord Kelvin and the other
physicists dissipated the idea of a molten interior of the
earth. Hence, because these other false hypotheses have already
in a measure been disposed of, as well as for the sake of
brevity, I shall here discuss only the third of the
prime postulates of the current system of geology, namely the
theory of Successive Ages. And when we have adjusted this
aspect of the science of geology to the facts of the rocks as
made known to us by modern discoveries, we shall find little in
this science out of harmony with the older view of a literal
Creation as taught in the Bible and as already confirmed by the
other branches of science which we have been examining.
There are five leading arguments against the reality of
these successive ages. Four of them must be dismissed here by a
brief summary of the facts as we know them to-day, referring
the reader to the author's larger work, where detailed evidence
is given for each. The fifth series of facts I shall
give here in more detail, though of course even this must be
but an outline of what is given elsewhere.
1. In the earlier days of the theory of successive ages it was
taught that only certain kinds of fossils were to be found
at the bottom of the series, or next to the Primitive or
Archæan. This feature of the theory was demanded by the
supposed universal spread of one type of life all around the
globe in the earliest age. But it is now known that the
so-called "oldest" fossiliferous rocks occur only in detached
patches over the globe, while other or "younger" kinds are just
as likely to be found on the Primitive or next to the
Archæan. Not only may any kind of fossiliferous rocks
occur next to the Archæan, but even the "youngest" may be
so metamorphosed and crystalline as to resemble exactly in this
respect the so-called "oldest" rocks. On the other hand some of
the very "oldest" rocks may, like the Cambrian strata around
the Baltic and in some parts of the United States, consist of
"muds scarcely indurated and sands still incoherent."[40]
All this means that many facts regarding the position
of the strata as well as regarding their consolidation
contradict the theory of successive ages.
2. Many of the rivers of the world completely ignore the
alleged varying ages of the rocks in the different parts of
their course, and treat them all as if of the same age or as if
they began sawing at them all at the same time. This is true of
the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Danube in Europe, the Sutlej of
India, and the upper part of the Colorado in America, not to
mention others. The old strand lines around all the continents
act in the very same way, ignoring the varying ages of the
rocks they happen to meet; as is also true of nearly all the
great faults or fissures which are of more than local extent.
The ore veins of the various minerals are about as likely to be
found in Tertiary or Mesozoic as in the Palæozoic. A very
similar lesson is to be learned from the fossils found lying
exposed on the deep ocean bottom; for they are about as likely
to be Palæozoic or Mesozoic as Tertiary.
From these facts we conclude that practically all the great
natural chronometers of the earth seem to treat the
fossiliferous rocks as if they are all of about the same
age, completely disregarding the distinctions in age
founded on the fossils.
3. According to the present chronological arrangement of the
rocks, very many genera, often whole tribes of animals, are
found as fossils only in the oldest rocks, and have skipped
all the others, though found in comparative abundance in
our modern world. Very many others have skipped from the
Mesozoic down, while still others skip large parts of
the series of successive ages.
These absurdities would all be avoided by acknowledging that
the current distinctions as to the ages of the fossils are
purely artificial, and that one fossil is intrinsically just as
old or as young as another.
4. It is now known that any kind of "young" beds whatsoever,
Mesozoic, Tertiary, or even Pleistocene, may be found in such
perfect conformability on some of the very oldest beds
over wide stretches of country that "the vast interval of time
intervening is unrepresented either by deposition or erosion";
while in some instances these age-separated formations so
closely resemble one another in structure and in mineralogical
make-up that, "were it not for fossil evidence, one would
naturally suppose that a single formation was being dealt with"
(McConnell); and these conditions are "not merely local, but
persistent over wide areas" (A. Geikie), so that the "numerous
examples" (Suess) of these conditions "may well be cause for
astonishment" (Suess).
A still more astonishing thing from the standpoint of the
current theories is that these conformable relations of
incongruous strata are often repeated over and over again in
the same vertical section, the same kind of bed reappearing
alternately with others of an entirely different "age," that
is, appearing "as if regularly interbedded" (A. Geikie)
with them, in a manifestly undisturbed series of strata.
Here again we have a very formidable series of facts whose
gravamen is directed wholly against the artificial distinctions
in age between the different groups of fossils; and their
argument is an eloquent plea that the fossils are neither older
nor younger but all of a similar age.
5. Our last fact demands a somewhat more extended
consideration; but it may be stated in advance briefly as
follows:
In very numerous cases and over hundreds and even thousands of
square miles, the conformable conditions specified in the
previous fact are exactly reproduced upside down; that
is, very "old" rocks occur with just as much appearance of
natural conformability on top of very "young" rocks, the area
in some instances covering many hundreds of square miles, and
in one particular instance in Montana and Alberta covering
about five or six thousand square miles of area.
The first notable example of this phenomenon was discovered at
Glarus, Switzerland, a good many years ago; since which time
this locality has become a classic in geological literature,
and has called out many ponderous monographs in German and
French by such men as Heim, Schardt, Lugeon, Rothpletz, and
Bertrand. This example, which was first (1870) called the
Glarner Double Fold by Escher and Heim, is now universally
called a nearly flat-lying "thrust fault," in accordance with
the explanations since adopted of similar phenomena elsewhere.
Without obtruding unnecessary technicalities upon my
non-professional readers, I may quote the words of Albert Heim
as to the conditions as now recognized in these parts:
"These flat-lying faults, of which those at Glarus were the
first to be discovered, are a universal phenomenon in
the Northern and Central Alps."[41]
The favorite method of explaining these conditions has
slightly changed within recent years, as already remarked. For
whereas the classic example at Glarus was at first spoken of as
a double fold-in from both sides toward the Sernf Valley, this
is now universally spoken of as a "thrust fault," with the
rocks all pushed one way. Incidentally it may be noted that
this very fact that what was long regarded as two completely
overturned folds is now spoken of as one flat-lying thrust
fault, is prima facie evidence that there is here no
physical proof of any real overturning of the strata, such
as we do find on a very small scale in true folded rocks. The
latter can usually be measured in yards, feet, or inches; while
in this example at Glarus the area involved would be measured
in many miles, and in some very similar examples to be
presently mentioned from America the measurement could best be
made in degrees of latitude and longitude or in arcs of the
earth's circumference. In these larger examples it is
manifestly impossible that there should be any physical
evidence sufficient to indicate a huge earth movement of this
character, especially when, as is usually the case, both the
upper and the lower strata are quite uninjured in
appearance. No; the fossils are here in the wrong order,
that is all. And so, to save the long established doctrines of
a very definite order of successive life-forms, this theory of
a "thrust fault" is offered as the best available explanation.
As Dr. Albert Heim himself once expressed it very naively in a
letter to the present writer, that the strata over these large
areas are in a position manifestly at direct disagreement with
the received order of the fossils, "is a fact which can be
clearly seen,--only we know not yet how to explain it in a
mechanical way."
An example in the Highlands of Scotland was about the next to
be discovered. Here, as Dana says, "a mass of the oldest
crystalline rocks, many miles in length from north to south,
was thrust at least ten miles westward over younger rocks, part
of the latter fossiliferous;" and he further declares, "the
thrust planes look like planes of bedding, and were long so
considered."[42]
Sir Archibald Geikie and others had at first described these
beds as naturally conformable; and when at length they were
convinced that the fossils would not permit this explanation,
Geikie gives us some very picturesque details as to how natural
they look.
The thrust planes, he says, are with much difficulty
distinguished "from ordinary stratification planes, like which
they have been plicated, faulted, and denuded. Here and there,
as a result of denudation, a portion of one of them appears
capping a hilltop. One almost refuses to believe that the
little outlier on the summit does not lie normally on the rocks
below it, but on a nearly horizontal fault by which it has been
moved into its place."
Of a similar example in Ross Shire he declares:
"Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception,
they could not have been more skilfully devised, ... and no one
coming first to the ground would suspect that what appears to
be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so."[43]
Here again we have unequivocal testimony from the most
competent of observers that there is no physical evidence
whatever to lead any one to say that a ponderous scale of
the earth's crust was really pushed up on top of other
portions, as this makeshift theory of "thrust faults" involves.
The fossils are here in the wrong order, just as in the
case at Glarus; that is all. The facts seem to be a flat
contradiction to the theory of definite successive ages, and to
save the theory this explanation of a "thrust fault" is
invented, though there is absolutely no physical evidence of
any disturbance of the strata.
Our next stopping place is in the Southern Appalachian
Mountains of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia. Here we
have the Carboniferous strata dipping gently to the southeast,
like an ordinary low monocline, under Cambrian or Lower
Silurian, one of these so-called faults having a reported
length of 375 miles,[44] while in another instance the upper
strata are said to have been pushed about eleven miles in the
direction of the "thrust."[45] These conditions, we are told,
"have provoked the wonder of the most experienced geologists,"[46] because of the perfectly natural appearance of
the surfaces of the strata affected; or as this same writer
puts it, "The mechanical effort is great beyond comprehension,
but the effect upon the rocks is inappreciable," and "the fault
dip is often parallel to the bedding of the one or the other
series of strata."[47] Which means, in other words, that these
"thrust planes" look just like ordinary planes of bedding
between conformable strata.
The Rocky Mountains furnish examples of many kinds of natural
phenomena on the very largest scale, and those of the sort here
under consideration are no exception to this rule. For here we
have an immense area east of the main divide, extending from
the middle of Montana up to the Yellowhead Pass in Alberta, or
over 350 miles long, where the tops of the mountains consist of
jointed limestones or argillites of Algonkian or pre-Cambrian
"age," resting on soft Cretaceous shales. Often the greater
part of the mass of a range will consist of these "older" and
harder rocks, which by the erosion of the soft underlying
shales are left standing in picturesque, rectangular,
cathedral-like masses, easily recognizable as far off as they
can be seen. And the almost entire absence of trees or other
vegetation helps one to trace out the relationship of these
formations over immense areas with little or no difficulty.
In the latitude of the Bow River, near the Canadian Pacific
main line, there is a long narrow valley of these Cretaceous
beds some sixty-five miles long, called the Cascade Trough,
with of course pre-Cambrian mountains on each side. Somewhat
further south there are two of these Cretaceous valleys
parallel to one another, and in some places three; while
just south of the fiftieth parallel of latitude, at Gould's
Dome, there are actually five parallel ranges of these
Palæozoic mountains, with four Cretaceous valleys in
between, one of these valleys, the Crow's Nest Trough,
being ninety-five miles long.
But we ought to take a nearer view of these wonderful
conditions. A convenient point of approach will be just east of
Banff, Alberta, near Kananaskis Station, where the Fairholme
Mountain has been described by R.G. McConnell of the Canadian
Survey. The latter remarks with amazement on the perfectly
natural appearance of these Algonkian limestones resting in
seeming conformability on Cretaceous shales, and says that the
line of separation between them, called in the theory the
"thrust plane," resembles in all respects an ordinary
stratification plane. I quote his language:
"The angle of inclination of its plane to the horizon is
very low, and in consequence of this its outcrop follows
a very sinuous line along the base of the mountains, and
acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly
horizontal formations.
"The best places for examining this fault are at the gaps of
the Bow and of the south fork of Ghost River.... The fault
plane here is nearly horizontal, and the two formations, viewed
from the valley, appear to succeed one another
conformably."[48]
This author adds the further interesting detail that the
underlying Cretaceous shales are "very soft," and "have
suffered very little by the sliding of the limestone over them."[49]
About a hundred miles further south, but still in Alberta, we
have the well-known Crow's Nest Mountain, a lone peak, which
consists of these same Algonkian limestones resting on a
Cretaceous valley "in a nearly horizontal attitude," as G.M.
Dawson says, which "in its structure and general appearance
much resembles Chief Mountain,"[50] another detached peak some
fifty miles further south, just across the boundary line in
Montana.
Chief Mountain has been well described by Bailey Willis,[51]
who estimates that the Cretaceous beds underneath this mountain
must be 3,500 feet thick; while the so-called "thrust plane"
"is essentially parallel to the bedding" of the upper series.[52]
"This apparently is true not only of the segments of thrust
surface beneath eastern Flattop, Yellow, and Chief Mountain,
but also of the more deeply buried portions which appear to dip
with the Algonkian strata into the syncline. While observation
is not complete, it may be assumed on a basis of fact that
thrust surfaces and bedding are nearly parallel over extensive areas."[53]
Quite recently this region has been studied by Marius R.
Campbell of the Washington Survey Staff (Bulletin 600), while
the part in Alberta has been studied by Rollin T. Chamberlin of
Chicago. Much of the vast area involved is not yet well
explored; but over it all, so far as it has been fully
examined, the same lithological and stratigraphical structures
reappear with the persistence of a repeating decimal. And were
it not for the exigencies of the theory of Successive Ages,
this whole region of some five or six thousand square miles
would be considered as only an ordinary example, on a rather
large scale, of undisturbed horizontal stratification cut up by
erosion into mountains of denudation, with of course occasional
instances of minor local disturbances here and there, as would
be expected over an area of this extent.
Richards and Mansfield in a recent paper describe the "Bannock
Overthrust," some 270 miles long, in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
The Carnegie Research recently reported a similar phenomenon
about 500 miles long in northern China.
But it would be tiresome to follow these conditions around the
world. We have plenty of examples, and we have them described
by the foremost of living geologists. What we need to do now is
to adopt a true scientific attitude of mind, a mind freed from
the hypnotizing influence of the current theories, in order
correctly to interpret the facts as we already have them.
How much of the earth's crust would we have to find in
this upside down order of the fossils, before we would be
convinced that there must be something hopelessly wrong with
this theory of Successive Ages which drives otherwise competent
observers to throw away their common sense and cling
desperately to a fantastic theory in the very teeth of such
facts?
The science of geology as commonly taught is truly in a most
astonishing condition, and doubtless presents the most peculiar
mixture of fact and nonsense to be found in the whole range of
our modern knowledge. In any minute study of a particular set
of rocks in a definite locality, geology always follows facts
and common sense; while in any general view of the world as a
whole, or in any correlation of the rocks of one region with
those of another region, it follows its absurd, unscientific
theories. But wherever it agrees with facts and common sense,
it contradicts these absurd theories; and wherever it agrees
with these theories, it contradicts facts and common sense.
That most educated people still believe its main thesis of a
definite age for each particular kind of fossil is a sad
but instructive example of the effects of mental inertia.
IV
The reader will find this matter discussed at length in the
author's "Fundamentals of Geology"; but here it will be
necessary only to draw some very obvious conclusions from the
five facts which we have set in opposition to the theory
of Successive Ages.
1. The first and absolutely incontrovertible conclusion is
that this theory of successive ages must be a gross blunder, in
its baleful effects on every branch of modern thought
deplorable beyond computation. But it is now perfectly obvious
that the geological distinctions as to age between the fossils
are fantastic and unjustifiable. No one kind of true fossil can
be proved to be older or younger than another intrinsically and
necessarily, and the methods of reasoning by which this idea
has been supported in the past are little else than a burlesque
on modern scientific methods, and are a belated survival from
the methods of the scholastics of the Middle Ages.
Not by any means that all rock deposits are of the same age.
The lower ones in any particular locality are of course "older"
than the upper ones, that is, they were deposited first. But
from this it by no means follows that the fossils contained in
these lower rocks came into being and lived and died before the
fossils in the upper ones. The latter conclusion involves
several additional assumptions which are wholly unscientific in
spirit and incredible as matters of fact, one of which
assumptions is the biological form of the onion-coat
theory. But since thousands of modern living kinds of
plants and animals are found in the fossil state, man
included, and no one of them can be proved to have lived
for a period of time alone and before others, we must by other
methods, more scientific and accurate than the slipshod methods
hitherto in vogue, attempt to decide as best we can how these
various forms of life were buried, and how the past and the
present are connected together. But the theory of definite
successive ages, with the forms of life appearing on earth in a
precise and invariable order, is dead for all coming time for
every man who has had a chance to examine the evidence and has
enough training in logic and scientific methods to know when a
thing is really proved.
And how utterly absurd for the friends of the Bible to spend
their time bandying arguments with the evolutionist over such
minor details as the question of just what geological "age"
should be assigned for the first appearance of man on the
earth, when the evolutionist's major premise is itself directly
antagonistic to the most fundamental facts regarding the first
chapters of the Bible, and above all, when this major premise
is really the weakest spot in the whole theory, the one sore
spot that evolutionists never want to have touched at all.
I fancy I hear some one object, and ask what we are to do with
the systematic arrangement of the fossils, the so-called
"geological succession," that monument to the painstaking
labors of thousands of scientists all over the world. This
geological series is still on our hands; what are we to do with
it?
It is scarcely necessary for me to say that this arrangement
of the fossils is not at all affected by my criticism of the
cause of the geological changes. The geological series is
merely an old-time taxonomic series, a classification of the
forms of life that used to live on the earth, and is of
course just as artificial as any similar arrangement of the
modern forms of life would be.
We may illustrate the matter by comparing this series with a
card index. The earlier students of geology arranged the
outline of the order of the fossils by a rather general
comparison with the series of modern life forms, which happened
to agree fairly well with the order in which they had found the
fossils occurring in England and France. But only a block out
of the middle of the complete card index could be made up from
the rocks of England and France; the rest has had to be made up
from the rocks found elsewhere. Louis Agassiz did herculean
work in rearranging and trimming this fossil card index so as
to make it conform better, not only to the companion card index
of the modern forms of life, but also to that of the embryonic
series. From time to time even now readjustments are made in
the details of all three indexes, the fossil, the modern, and
the embryonic, the method of rearrangement being charmingly
simple: just taking a card out of one place and putting it
into another place where we may think it more properly
belongs. And then if we can convince our fellow scientists over
the world that our rearrangement is justified, our adjustment
will stand,--until some one else arises to do a better job.
When a new set of rocks is found in any part of the world it is
simplicity itself for any one acquainted with the fossil index
system to assign these new beds to their proper place, though
of course the one doing this must be prepared to defend his
assignment with pertinent and sufficient taxonomic reasons.
In view of these facts, we need not be concerned as to the
fate of the geological classification of the fossils. It is a
purely artificial system, just as is the modern classification;
but both are useful, and so far as they represent true
relationships they will both stand unaffected by any change we
may make in our opinions as to how the fossils were buried. But
in view of this purely artificial character of the geological
series, what a strange sight is presented by the usual methods
employed to "prove" the exact order in which evolution has
taken place, such for instance as the use made of the graded
series of fossil "horses," to illustrate some particular theory
of just how organic development has occurred. One might
just as well arrange the modern dogs from the little spaniel to
the St. Bernard, for the geological series is just as
artificial as would be this of the dogs.
2. Another conclusion from the facts enumerated above is that
there has obviously been a great world catastrophe, and that
this must be assigned as the cause of a large part,--just
how large a part it is at present difficult to say,--of the
changes recorded in the fossiliferous rocks. This sounds very
much like a modern confirmation of the ancient record of a
universal Deluge; and I say confidently that no one who will
candidly examine the evidence now available on this point can
fail to be impressed with the force of the argument for a world
catastrophe as the general conclusion to be drawn from the
fossiliferous rocks all over the globe.
3. Finally, there is the further conclusion, the only
conclusion now possible, if there is no definite order in which
the fossils occur, namely, that life in all its varied forms
must have originated on the globe by causes not now
operative, and this Creation of all the types of life may
just as reasonably have taken place all at once, as in some
order prolonged over a long period.
As I have pointed out in my "Fundamentals," a strict
scientific method may destroy the theory of Successive Ages,
and it may show that there has been a great world catastrophe.
But here the work of strict inductive science ends. It cannot
show just how or when life or the various kinds of life did
originate, it can only show how it did not. It destroys
forever the fantastic scheme of a definite and precise order in
which the various types of life occurred on the globe, and thus
it leaves the way open to say that life must have
originated by just such a literal Creation as is recorded in
the first chapters of the Bible. But this is as far as it can
be expected to go. It is strong evidence in favor of a direct
and literal Creation; but it furnishes this evidence by
indirection, that is, by demolishing the only alternative or
rival of Creation that can command a moment's attention from a
rational mind.
But if life is not now being created from the not-living,
if new kinds of life are not now appearing by natural process,
if above all we cannot prove in any way worthy of being called
scientific that certain types of life lived before others, if
in fine man himself is found fossil and no one fossil can be
proved older than another or than that of man himself, why is
not a literal Creation demonstrated as a scientific certainty
for every mind capable of appreciating the force of logical
reasoning?
____________________
[33]"A Critique of the Theory of Evolution," p. 24.
[34]"History of Geology," p. 59.
[35]A. Geikie, "Founders of Geology," p. 112.
[36]"Illustr. of Univ. Prog.," p. 343.
[37]Vol. II, p.580.
[38]"Discourses," pp. 279-288.
[39]"The Glacial Nightmare," Preface, vii.
[40]J.A. Howe; Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. II, p. 86.
Cambridge Edition.
[41]"Der Bau der Schweizeralpen," p. 17.
[42]"Manual," pp. 111, 534.
[43]Nature, November 13, 1884, pp. 29-35.
[44]Bailey Willis, Geol. Survey, Report, Vol. 13, p. 228.
[45]C.W. Hayes, Bull. Geol. Soc., Vol. 2, pp.
141-154.
[46]Willis, op. cit., p. 228.
[47]Willis, op. cit., p. 227.
[48]Annual Report, 1886, Part D, pp. 33, 34.
[49]Report, 1886, Part D, p. 84.
[50]Report, 1885, Part B, p. 67.
[51]Bull. Geol. Soc., Vol. 13, pp. 305-352.
[52]Id., p. 336.
[53]Id., p. 336.