Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing

“ This vast lapse of time, as commensurate with the existence of the inhabited globe, is essential to the Theory of Development. It must be established, as it has been, by independent evidence of its own, before it can give to that theory its absolutely necessary support. But the Theory of Development in its turn helps the mind to believe and realize this enormous lapse of time, with its seemingly never-ending march and flow, rank upon rank, wave upon wave, by finding work and employment for all its almost measureless duration. ”

“ He taught the world that Nature has a system. He took all naturalists for his pupils, and taught them how to speak. He taught them, I mean, how to name the objects of their study. He did in this respect for science what the inventors of money did for trade and commerce. He bade us designate each species by a couple of words instead of by a descriptive paragraph. By thus making simple and easy what before was complicated and cumbrous, he for the first time made possible a thorough discussion of all plants and animals, and threw open the study to mankind at large. ”

“ If we find them piled up in enormous hills and mountains high above the level of the sea, and far from its coasts, we know that they did not grow in that position; that once their proud crests and ridges lay low in an ocean bed. They could not have been formed on a sudden, or rapidly, or by any other than the slow steps of infinitesimally small successive accumulations: for we find them filled throughout with the evidences of life, shells and sponges, and corals of exquisite beauty and delicacy, generations after generations of which must have had time to build up their beautiful fabrics. ”

“ Hence it came about that Geology, the science which deals not in warm life and lovely colours, but in mud and stones and bones and old refuse, obtained a predominance and a publicity which it could not otherwise easily have secured. Persons of candid mind would naturally wish to hear both sides of an exciting question. Persons of pre-occupied mind would still sometimes wish to see for themselves what nonsense the geologists were writing. Of course it was foolish of them, for if a man has made up what he calls his mind he ought never to hear the other side. ”

“ There is an old jest that, in the pride of antiquity, a Welshman generally traces back his lineage not only as far as Adam, but a great deal further. Nothing was easier, before the age of historical criticism, than for men or nations, whose real origin was lost in obscurity, to link their names to an illustrious past. Nothing was easier than to develope the obscurity itself into a long line of remote ancestors, whose names and virtues could be invented and multiplied at pleasure. ”

“ Let a creature’s remains escape being devoured, or burnt, or trampled to pieces, or being dissolved by the rain, or crumbled into dust by rolling waves and mud and stones gathered upon them, their perils are not yet over. Even in the grasp of the hard rock, the fossil may be horribly distorted by pressure, split asunder by cleavage, boiled and baked and crystallized, till none of its features remain what they were, or till the very fact of its presence becomes only the question of a dim surmise. ”

“ Now, the men of science, with rare exceptions, make no claim from the scientific point of view to know what goes on in Heaven or in Hades; but, as I understand the matter, they are modestly certain that our globe has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; that within the human period the whole of its surface has never been submerged at once; that no human being ever lived to the age of nine hundred years; that the human species began quite otherwise than with an abruptly created pair; that no woman was ever formed of a rib taken from the side of a man ”

“ To some ears such a theory must sound wild and preposterous beyond all the boundaries of sane and rational thinking. And, in truth, no censure could be too severe, no ridicule too keen for so extravagant a piece of folly as this theory must be, if the old and still prevailing notions about the age of the world have any foundation in fact. It only begins to be reasonable, if we can afford to stretch our notions of history from the narrow margin of six thousand to the broader field of six hundred thousand years, with an indefinite past in the background. ”

“ Finally, we may ask, where are the traces of so tremendous and unparalleled a convulsion as one that could wrap the whole world in water, and hold all its dædal beauty for many months in that drowned condition, till a tempest still more furious and unparalleled drave heaven and earth, the clouds and ocean, once more asunder? We know how the little trilobite in the Devonian seas behaved in its hour of peril millions of years back; we know what food men ate long ages before the Flood, what weapons they used, what houses they built, what animals they tamed ”

“ A Wellingtonia gigantea, with its stupendous height and graceful form, with its bark and wood, and sap and pith, and cones and innumerable spikelets, seems wonderfully noble and vastly superior in the scale of creation to a spoonful of salt; yet every one of the tiny grains has, so far as we know, full as much sense and as much power of enjoyment as the stately tree. ”

“ It has indeed been a curious fancy for men so long to entertain, that though they were created in the image of God to have dominion over the lower creatures, yet those creatures without reason, without teaching, without the God-likeness, should be able to surpass them, by a miracle or a mystery, in the accuracy or perfection of their works.
The pursuit which man in a low state of civilization has ever thought most noble is that of war. The essence of war lies in the combination of forces and the choice of opportunity. ”

“ The products of man’s reason are not, you will readily admit, always perfect, and yet man’s reason is a part of the creation, and of nature’s work. The waste of life is prodigious, if such a term is applicable to the circumstance that often millions of spores are produced in order that half a dozen plants may grow; millions of eggs in the roe of a fish, in order that the parents may be represented by three or four individuals. The bee defends itself by its sting, but its weapon of defence is fatal to itself. ”

“ Only the flow of time is unending, of time which does nothing, but out of or without which nothing can be done,—of time, replete with glorious wonders as far back as the knowledge or the imagination of man can penetrate, through every age, through every million of years that can be rescued from forgetfulness, bearing fresh testimony, in the greatness and the endlessness of the work, to the eternal power and wisdom of the Supreme Worker. ”

“ NOTE ON THE HYPOTHESIS OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.
Presuming that there is not a particle of evidence as yet established in favour of the supposition known as the doctrine of abiogenesis, it does not follow that no such evidence ever will, or ever can, be forthcoming. The advancement of science is continually doing away with harsh, abrupt outlines, and revealing the softest shades of transition in the varied scenery of nature. Between organic and inorganic matter, between the inert and the living mass, the line of separation has been hitherto, to our minds, the hardest and sharpest of all. ”

“ Can you measure either of those intervals in the years of common chronology? Yet all over the world the succession of geological strata proclaims the recurrence over and over again of such intervals; silent, indeed, as to positive evidence, but widening the possible limits of time’s duration to the furthest stretch of fancy.
All our great continents have been ever so many times, either in the mass or piecemeal, under the waves of the ocean. Nothing hinders that the bed of every great ocean should have been ever so many times turned into dry land. ”

“ The signs and natural monuments of the catastrophe, which should have been visible or discoverable on every side, can nowhere be ascertained,—things that the waters should have swept away or torn down they have left undisturbed, shell-mounds and glacier moraines and boulderstones on the mountain-side; while the great museum of the dead which they should have formed, one would think, over all the earth, to constitute one striking and indisputable geological date, as well as a world-wide monument of religion, is nowhere to be found. ”

“ That the record is really imperfect is not a matter which admits of controversy. No one supposes that every species and variety that ever existed in past ages on the globe is represented at this very day by fossil specimens in prime enough condition to exhibit all the characteristics of the creature as it once lived. No one supposes that, if such specimens existed, all of them ever could or would be found by human beings. It is not in the nature of a fossil to present all the characteristics of the creature as it once lived. It cannot possibly do it; for the fossil is without life and motion. ”

“ One prevailing tradition, it is true, is current alike in sacred and profane literature, of a far-off golden time, an age of simplicity, when man conversed with the beasts of the field, when the earth brought forth her fruits spontaneously, with her bosom as yet unvexed by the ploughshare, ere the knowledge or the discrimination of good and evil had come into the world—the record, in one word, as all these details tend to prove, of a time before man had become a moral being ”

“ If any intelligent persons can discern the undulatory theory of light and the modern system of botany in the first chapter of Genesis, no one would wish to complain of their ingenuity, unless they proposed to support a particular theory of inspiration by these discoveries. But then, if the theories of science are only ‘the undulations of human opinion,’ it becomes necessary to ask why the botanical undulation of the present day is accepted as a witness, and the Darwinian undulation rejected. ”

“ Surely, the working of this principle of Correlation indicates a far-sighted Providence of the results, the disastrous monstrosities, that would otherwise have sprung from the law of Variation.
Man’s efforts are considerably limited, moreover, by the law of Reversion. Now, supposing many differing species to be descended, as we maintain, from common ancestors, what ought to be the observable effects of this law? Evidently, we should expect the character of one species now and then to appear in species allied to it, or species of kindred origin to vary in the same manner. ”

“ But apart from the ingenuity necessary for the propagation of the species, he considers the same bird to be a very idiot, without the least glimmering of thought or common sense, mistaking a piece of chalk for an egg, and sitting upon it as though it were one, insensible of an increase or diminution in the number of those she lays, not distinguishing between her own and those of another species; and when the birth appears of never so different a bird, cherishing it for her own. ”

“ Here again, if the surface of the globe supplied nutriment for all its plants, there would be at least no need for this destructive competition.
And how is it that this wide, wide world does not supply food enough for all the vegetable forms that make an effort to live upon it? The answer to this curious question has long been known, though not sufficiently attended to. It would not be fair to say that Nature is stingy in her supplies of food, but rather that she is too generously prolific of forms of life. ”

“ It is well known that after the discovery of almost every great truth a sort of feeling or instinct of it can be traced back in obscure hints, in chance expressions, in vague guesses, in flights of imagination, so that people very soon begin to fancy that they have all along understood and maintained the very theory, which, on its first appearance, they violently rejected as something false and even vicious. ”

“ Esquimaux and Hottentots, Japanese and Red Indians, the Negro and the Greek, are thus united in ties of cousinship by no means remote. Arts, monuments, and modes of life essentially different in spirit and character are supposed, within these narrow bounds of time, to have sprung up; nor only to have sprung up, but to have passed away, leaving only a few faint vestiges to recall the artists, the heroes, the lawgivers, the national temper, the genius of the time, whereunto they owed their existence. It must surely be allowed that marriage customs change with slow reluctance ”

“ To know that sin is sinful is to become conscious of the will of God, to become conscious of a good and perfect will to which our own ought to be conformed. Not to know this will is to be still brutish; to know it only by the teaching of others is to be still among the things of a child; to know it of oneself, which is in other words to know it by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, who alone can implant the doctrine with unfailing demonstration and enable us to receive His discipline,—this at length is to be a man made in the image of God. ”

“ The intelligence of man reached a point not all at once but by degrees, at which it was able to invent helps and appliances for its own benefit and improvement, and thenceforward its strides were more rapid and its distinction from lower intelligences more marked. Cancel the art of printing, cancel the signs of the alphabet, cancel the forms of articulate language, and with each one of these steps you will thrust back and degrade, not perhaps every single human intellect, but certainly the whole mass and average of human intelligence. ”

“ Against any given theory of production, no objection pure and simple that the theory makes too large a demand upon time, can be maintained. An objection, to be valid against the existence of life on the earth a million of years back, must postulate that there was no earth then in existence, or none capable of supporting life; for if we choose to stand by the doctrine of final causes, life upon the earth must have begun as soon as life upon the earth was possible, otherwise we should have a fair and perfect design with its purpose unaccomplished ”