Philip Henry Gosse

“ The remotely divided dorsal here tells of many years of life; but tells deceitfully, for the Sword-fish is but just created.
Ha! the Sword-fish has darted away, like lightning, after a finny victim. See with what doublings and windings he pursues it, and how the terrified prey uses all its powers to escape from its gigantic enemy! Now they near the shore; and now the frightened quarry has leaped out of the sea upon yonder flat shelf of rock, where it lies gasping and floundering, delivered indeed from its pursuer, but only to die by being drowned in the air. ”

“ It is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence. And this is not the law of some particular species, but of all: it pervades all classes of animals, all classes of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from the monad up to man: the life of every organic being is whirling in a ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any commencement,—I will not say any certain or even probable, but any possible, commencement. The cow is as inevitable a sequence of the embryo, as the embryo is of the cow. ”

“ The course of nature is a circle. I do not mean the plan of nature; I am not speaking of a circular arrangement of species, genera, families, and classes, as maintained by MacLeay, Swainson, and others. Their theories may be true, or they may be false; I decide nothing concerning them; I am not alluding to any plan of nature, but to its course, cursus,—the way in which it runs on. This is a circle.
Here is in my garden a scarlet runner. It is a slender twining stem some three feet long, beset with leaves, with a growing bud at one end, and with the other inserted in the earth. ”

“ The geologist finds a fossil skeleton. His acquaintance with anatomy enables him to pronounce that the objects found are bones. He sees cylinders, condyles, cavities for the marrow, scars of attachment of muscles and tendons, foramina for the passage of nerves and blood-vessels; he finds the internal structure, no less than the form and surface, such as to leave not a doubt that these are real bones. Now universal experience has taught him that bones imply the existence of flesh; that flesh implies blood; that blood implies life; that life implies time. ”

“ I do not say may have been, but MUST have been created—on this principle of a prochronic development, with distinctly traceable records. It was the law of organic creation.
It may be objected, that, to assume the world to have been created with fossil skeletons in its crust,—skeletons of animals that never really existed,—is to charge the Creator with forming objects whose sole purpose was to deceive us. The reply is obvious. Were the concentric timber-rings of a created tree formed merely to deceive? Were the growth lines of a created shell intended to deceive? ”

“ The elegant spinous shell-fish that we discern yonder, half-buried in the sandy floor of the sea—I mean that lilac-tinted Prickly Venus (Dione Veneris) needs no shelly protection for its siphons, which, as you may observe, are protruded to a great length. But a lesson not less instructive than that taught by the tube-frills of the Clavagella, is inculcated by the valves of the Dione. Near the hinder margin of each valve there is a ridge which runs from the beak to the front edge, a ridge which bears the series of long slender shelly spines, that imparts such a charm to this shell. ”

“ All naturalists have speculated upon the great plan of Nature; a grand array of organic essences, in which every species should be related in like ratio to its fellow species, by certain affinities, without gaps and without redundancies; the whole constituting a beautiful and perfect unity, a harmonious scheme, worthy of the infinite Mind that conceived it. Such a perfect plan has never been presented by any existing fauna or flora; nor is it made up by uniting the fossil faunas and floras to the recent ones ”

“ Millions of forest-trees sprang up, towered to heaven, and fell, to be crushed into the coal strata which make our winter fires. Hundreds [Pg 95] of feet measure the thickness of what were once succulent plants, but pressed together like paper-pulp, and consolidated under a weight absolutely immensurable. Yet there remain the scales of their stems, the elegant reticulated patterns of their bark, the delicate tracery of their leaf-nerves, indelibly depicted by an unpatented process of "nature-printing." ”

“ The noble Tree-fern before us (Alsophila aculeata) has this instant been called into being by the creating voice of God. Here it stands, lifting up its columnar stem, and spreading its minutely fretted fronds all around, in a vaulted canopy above our heads, through the filagree work of whose expanse the sunbeams play in a soft green radiance. It has this instant been created. ”

“ On the summit of this rounded hill is a very different plant from the last. Beautiful it also is, but grandeur and majesty are its leading attributes. It is a dense and massive clump of the Tulda Bamboo. How noble these straight-jointed stems, cylinders of polished green, shooting their points right upwards, and towering to a height of eighty feet! The numerous panicles of tufty blossom are gracefully bending from the summits, and from the tip of every branch, nodding in the breeze. ”

“ It is not only that universal experience has declared the fact that every skeleton was once part of a living body; it has shown that the very structure and nature of the skeleton implied living body. The skeleton, in every part, displays a regard for the advantages of the living animal; it is built expressly for it; by itself it is nothing—a machine without any object; its joints, its cavities, its apophyses, its processes, all have special reference to tissues and organs which are not here now, but which belong to the living body. ”

“ Hence the minuteness and undeniableness of the proofs of life which geologists rely on so confidently, and present with such justifiable triumph, do not in the least militate against my principle. The marks of Hyænas' teeth on the bones of Kirkdale cave; the infant skeletons associated with adult skeletons of the same species; the abundance of coprolites; the foot-tracks of Birds and Reptiles; the glacier-scratches on rocks; and hundreds of other beautiful and most irresistible evidences of pre-existence, I do not wish to undervalue, nor to explain away. ”

“ Allowing for the difference of species, the skeleton, when worked out of its matrix, and set up, is precisely like that of the little beast at whose death you were actually present, whose bones you cleaned with your own hands, and mounted for your own museum. It would be as reasonable to deny that the one is the skeleton of a real animal as the other. ”

“ Let us forsake the ocean-shore, and walk again through the glades of the virgin forest. A White-ant (Termes) crosses our path, and, by tracking him home, we speedily discover his dwelling, an enormous structure composed of gnawed wood cemented with an animal secretion, and formed into thin but very firm and hard layers. Swarms of labourers are passing in and out; and, on our breaking away a portion of the edifice, out come crowding the warriors, with formidable jaws extended widely, ready for the fight. ”

“ Now may we not say with confidence, that the sounding-winged insect looks back to the pupa, the pupa to the larva, the larva to the egg-boat? And more, that the form of the boat,—a form so essential that it could not have lived without it,—looked back to the crossed feet of the mother-gnat, the impress of whose angle its extremities sustained?
Of course we might reason thus: but yet we should be at fault; for the ringing swarm of merry Gnats has been this very evening created. ”

“ The young plant before us has been this moment created, and created in this incipient stage of growth: and yet there is, even here, an indubitable evidence, so far as physical phenomena can afford it, of a past history. It would be utterly impossible to select any stage in the life of the Earth-pea, which did not connect itself, visibly and palpably, with a previous stage. ”

“ And, in order that the newly-hatched young may have a copious supply of food at hand, the parent chafer with its jaws detaches a mass of recent ordure, which it then rolls over the ground with its hind feet, until it acquires a globular form, and a coating of earth or sand. An egg is then deposited in the centre of the ball, which is rolled into a hole made in the earth to receive it. The coating of earth drying and hardening, keeps the interior of the mass fresh and moist until the young grub is hatched, when it at once begins to devour its savoury and delicate provision. ”

“ Why should we find any difficulty in supposing that the geological changes which appear to have passed upon the globe, after its creation, and before its curse, were to the first man sources of ever-renewing admiration, delight, and advantage? ”

“ Admit for a moment, as a hypothesis, that the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole life-history of the globe, commencing with any point which the geologist may imagine to have been a fit commencing point, and ending with some unimaginable acme in the indefinitely distant future. ”

“ Mathematicians have satisfactorily determined that the mean density of the globe is about five-and-a-half times that of water, or about twice that of granite, a fact inconsistent with any other supposition than that the interior is occupied by substances maintained in a fluid state by intense heat. The lowest point that has yet been patent to human observation is occupied by the granite, a compound rock, which bears evident marks of having been once in a state of fusion, and of having cooled slowly, and that under immense pressure, contracting and crystallizing as it parted with its heat. ”

“ We have reason to believe that species die out, and are replaced by other species, like the individuals which belong to the species, and the organs which belong to the individual. But is the life of the species a circle returning into itself? In other words, if we could take a sufficiently large view of the whole plan of nature, should we discern that the existence of species δ necessarily involved the pre-existence of species γ, and must inevitably be followed by species ε? ”

“ Perhaps some one will say, "All this might be tenable, supposing the world were an organism. Your argument goes to show that organic essences in every stage of their existence present proofs of pre-existence; but what analogy is there between the lifeless inorganic globe (in which evidences of past processes are apparent, independent of the fossil organisms) , and a living organic being,—plant or animal?"
I answer, The point in the economy of the organic creatures, on which their prochronism rests, is not the organic, but the circular condition of their being. ”

“ Shall we accept the antediluvian, or the diluvian stratification? the six ages or the six days of creation? the irruptions of internal fire that occurred chiliads before Man was made—those during his protracted paradisaic state, or those at the time of the Flood?—the extension of the Mosaic record to universal nature, or its limitation to a region of south-western Asia?
I am not blaming, far less despising, the efforts [Pg 29] that have been made for harmonizing the teachings of Scripture and science. I heartily sympathise with them. What else could good men do? ”

“ But the feathers have already begun to develop before the young bird leaves the egg. And the structure of the egg carries us back to the oviduct of the parent-fowl.
At what stage of existence, then, could a bird, by possibility, have been created, which did not present distinct records of prochronic development?
If we come to the Mammalia, the impossibility of finding such a stage becomes only more and more obvious. For it is a law in physiology, that the higher the grade of organization assigned to any being, the more it is assisted in infancy by the parent. ”

“ How curious are the leafless but leaf-like dilatations of the stem—these flat oval plates of parenchyma, studded with clusters of woody and most acute spines!—Every one of these expansions is an expression of time, as they are of course successive, though several may be formed in a single season; and not only so, but the tufts of spines, which grow at the points of intersection of crossing lines, in a network pattern, are all successive, appearing in turn as the expanded joint of the stem grows out. ”

“ He lived, partly, in order to proclaim the fact of his creation. And, could his own body, or any of the objects created at the same time, have been subjected to a physiological examination, they would, no doubt, have been found to indicate their miraculous production in their very destitution of all the traces of an early growth; whereas the shell of the earth is a crowded storehouse of evidence of its gradual formation. ”

“ Has not the physiologist irrefragable grounds for it, founded on universal experience? Has not observation abundantly shown, that, wherever the bones, flesh, blood, teeth, nails, hair of man exist, the aggregate body has passed through stages exactly correspondent to those alluded to above, and has originated in the uterus of a mother, its fœtal life being, so to speak, a budding out of hers? ”