Sir John William Dawson

“ There is something very striking in this succession of a new plant world without any material advance. It is like passing in the modern world from one district to another, in which we see the same forms of life, only represented by distinct though allied species. Thus, when the voyager crosses the Atlantic from Europe to America, he meets with pines, oaks, birches, poplars, and beeches of the same genera with those he had left behind; but the species are distinct. It is something like this that meets us in our ascent into the Carboniferous world of plants. ”

“ Yet no book has ever thrown itself into so decided antagonism with all the great forces of evil in the world. Tyranny hates it, because the Bible so strongly maintains the individual value and rights of man as man. The spirit of caste dislikes it for the same reason. Anarchical license, on the other hand, finds nothing but discouragement in it. Priestcraft gnashes its teeth at it, as the very embodiment of private judgment in religion, and because it so scornfully ignores human authority in matters of conscience, and human intervention between man and his Maker. ”

“ Even in respect to the question of species, in all the long chain between the Ascidian and the man, he has not certainly established one link; and in the very last change, that from the ape-like ancestor, he equally fails to satisfy us as to matters so trivial as the loss of the hair, which, on the hypothesis, clothed the pre-human back, and on matters so weighty as the dawn of human reason and conscience.
We thus see that evolution as an hypothesis has no basis in experience or in scientific fact, and that its imagined series of transmutations has breaks which cannot be filled. ”

“ Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin, was the first science to establish on a basis of observed facts the necessity of a beginning and end of the world. But even physical science now teaches us that the visible universe is a vast machine for the dissipation of energy; that the processes going on in it must have had a beginning in time, and that all things tend to a final and helpless equilibrium. This necessity implies an unseen power, an invisible universe, in which the visible universe must have originated, and to which its energy is ever returning. ”

“ Had the Primordial life begun with species altogether inscrutable and unexampled in succeeding ages, this would no doubt have been mysterious; but next to this is the mystery of the oldest forms of life being also among the newest. One great fact shines here with the clearness of noon-day. Whatever the origin of these creatures, they represent families which have endured till now in the struggle for existence without either elevation or degradation. Here, again, we may formulate another creative law. In every great group there are some forms much more capable of long continuance than others. ”

“ If we imagine a world altogether destitute of life, we still might have geological formations in progress. Not only would volcanoes belch forth their liquid lavas and their stones and ashes, but the waves and currents of the ocean and the rains and streams on the land, with the ceaseless decomposing action of the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, would be piling up mud, sand, and pebbles in the sea. There might even be some formation of limestone taking place where springs charged with bicarbonate of lime were oozing out on the land or the bottom of the waters. ”

“ This is the balance of parts and forces within the organism itself. The organism is a complex machine; and if its parts have been put together by chance and are drifting onward in the path of evolution, there must of necessity be a continual struggle going on between [90] the different organs and functions, each tending to swallow up the others and each struggling for its own existence. This resolution of the body of each animal into a house divided against itself is at first sight so revolting to common sense and right feeling that few like to contemplate it. ”

“ Even if we refuse to recognise all higher grounds [363] of classification, and condescend, with some great zoologists of our time, to regard nature with the eyes of mere anatomists, or in the same way that a brick-layer’s apprentice may be supposed to regard distinctions of architectural styles, we can arrive at no other conclusion. Let us imagine an anatomist, himself neither a man nor a monkey, but a being of some other grade, and altogether ignorant of the higher ends and powers of our species, to contemplate merely the skeleton of a man and that of an ape. ”

“ I say for a time, because life is, in the visible universe, as at present constituted, but a temporary exception, introduced from that unseen world where it is no longer the exception, but the eternal rule. In a still higher sense, then, than that in which matter and force testify to a Creator, organization and life, whether in the plant, the animal, or man, bear the same testimony, and exist as outposts put forth in the succession of ages from that higher heaven that surrounds the visible universe. ”

“ Even that early post-glacial age in which primitive man seems first to have spread himself over our continents was one richer both in animal and plant life than the present. The geographical changes which closed this period and inaugurated the modern era seem to have reduced not only the area of the continents but the variety of land life in a very remarkable manner. Thus our last lesson from the genesis and migrations of plants is the humbling one that the present world is by no means the best possible in so far as richness of vegetable and animal life is concerned. ”

“ But incomplete though our picture necessarily is, and obscured by the dust of time, it may serve in some degree to render green to our eyes those truly primeval forests which treasured up for our long winter nights the Palæozoic sunshine, and established for us those storehouses of heat-giving material which work our engines and propel our ships and carriages. Truly they lived not in vain, both as realizing for us a type of vegetation which otherwise we could not have imagined, and as preparing the most important of all the substrata of our modern arts and manufactures. ”

“ On the hypothesis of evolution, the animal thus ceases to be, in the proper sense of the term, even a machine, and becomes a mere mass of conflicting parts depending for any constancy they may have on a chance balancing of hostile forces, without any compelling power to bring them together at first, or any means to bind them to joint action in the system. The more such a doctrine is considered, the more difficult does it seem to believe in the possibility of its truth. Evolution has already reduced the cosmos into chaos, the harmony of the universe into discord ”

“ On the other hand, this sublime dogma of creation leaves us perfectly free to interrogate nature for ourselves, as to all that it can reveal of the duration and progress of the creative work. But the positive gain which comes from this ancient formula goes far beyond these negative qualities. If received, this one word of the Old Testament is sufficient to deliver us forever from the superstitious dread of nature, and to present it to us as neither self-existent nor omnipotent, but as the mere handiwork of a spiritual Creator to whom we are kin ”

“ When we trace the long history from an incandescent fire-mist to a finished earth, and vast ages occupied by the dynasties of plant and animal life, we see not merely a mighty maze, an almost endless procession of changes, but that all of these were related to one another by a chain of causes and effects leading onward to greater variety and complexity, while retaining throughout the traces of the means employed. ”

“ Nay, more, this power which resides within man rules with omnipotent energy the material organism, driving its nerve forces until cells and fibres are worn out and destroyed, taxing muscles and tendons till they break, impelling its slave the body even to that which will bring injury and death itself. Surely, what we thus see in man must be the image and likeness of the Great Spirit. We can escape from this conclusion only by one or other of two assumptions, either of which is rather to be called a play upon words than a scientific theory. ”

“ He rises to the contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications. ”

“ But if we ascend from one phenomenon to another, beyond the sphere of contingent and changeable appearance, we find ourselves arrested by a Being unchangeable and supreme, the first expression and absolute cause of all existence, in whom diversity unites with unity, an eternal problem, insoluble to science, but ever present to the human consciousness. Here we reach the true source of the idea of religion, and there presents itself distinctly to the mind that conception to which we apply instinctively the name of God. ”

“ In mercy to humanity, this state of things was terminated by a great physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the continents—that Post-glacial flood, which must have swept away the greater part of men, and many species of great beasts, and left only a few survivors to re-people the world, just as the mammoth and other gigantic animals had to give place to smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes it seemed determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types should survive to re-people the world. ”

“ It runs, leaps, and glides through the herbage of the coal forests, intent on the pursuit of snails and insects, its eye glancing and its bright scales shining in the sun. This is a picture of the best known species of Hylonomus drawn from the life. Yet the anatomist, when he examines the imperfectly-ossified joints of its backbone, and the double joint at the back of its skull, will tell you that it is after all little better than a mere newt, an ass in a lion’s skin, a jackdaw with borrowed feathers, and that it has no right to have fine scales, or to be able to run on the land. ”

“ On the other hand, the student of nature must not content himself with "writing Latin names on white paper," wherewith to label nature's productions, but must rise to the contemplation of the order and beauty of the Cosmos as a revelation of Divinity. Both will thus rise to that highest taste which will enable them to appreciate not only the elegance of individual forms, but their structure, their harmonies, their grouping and their relations, their special adaptation, and their places as parts of a great system. ”