Sir John William Dawson

“ The plant gives no data from which we can calculate the functions of the animal. The Protozoon gives no data from which we can calculate the specialties of the Mollusc, the Articulate, or the Vertebrate. Nor unhappily do the present conditions of life of themselves give us any sure grounds for predicting the new creations that may be in store for our old planet. Those who think to build a philosophy and even a religion on such data are mere dreamers, and have no scientific basis for their dogmas. ”

“ In this discovery of organic remains in the primary rocks, we hail with joy the dawn of a new epoch in the critical history of these earlier formations. Already in its light, the primeval geological time is seen to be everywhere animated, and peopled with new animal forms of whose very existence we had previously no suspicion. Life, which had hitherto been supposed to have first appeared in the Primordial division of the Silurian period, is now seen to be immeasurably lengthened beyond its former limit, and to embrace in its domain the most ancient known portions of the earth's crust. ”

“ A dredger who should have no other information as to the existing population of the world, except what he could gather from the deposits formed under several hundred fathoms of water, would necessarily have very inadequate conceptions of the matter. In like manner a geologist who should have no other information as to the animal life of the Mesozoic ages than that furnished by some of the thick beds of white chalk, might imagine that he had reached a period when the simplest kinds of protozoa predominated over all other forms of life ”

“ Just as we can trace every individual animal to a microscopic germ in which all its parts were potentially present, so we can trace species, genera, and larger groups of animals to their commencement at different points of the earth's history, and can endeavour to follow the lines of creation or descent back to the first beings in which vital powers manifested themselves. All such beginnings must end in mystery, for as yet we do not know how either a germ or a perfect animal could originate from inanimate matter ”

“ If it had no living ancestors, we are thus face to face with the problem of the origin of animal life, either by what has been termed "Abiogenesis" of a merely physical and fortuitous kind, or by creation. This implies the previous production of the complex organic compound known as "Protoplasm," which can, so far as we know, be produced only through the agency of previously living "Protoplasm" formed by living plants. We have, therefore, to presuppose the "Abiogenesis" or creation of plants as predecessors of the animal ”

“ In Eozoon we must discern not only a mass of jelly, but a being endowed with that higher vital force which surpasses vegetable life and also physical and chemical forces; and in this animal energy we must see an emanation from a Will higher than our own, ruling vitality itself; and this not merely to the end of constructing the skeleton of a Protozoon, but of elaborating all the wonderful developments of life that were to follow in succeeding ages, and with reference to which the production and growth of this creature were initial steps. ”

“ If the world is made to stand on an elephant, and this on a tortoise, and this on lower forms, it helps us not at all if the last supporter must stand on nothing. The difficulty thus postponed only becomes greater; and at the end we have to imagine, not only life and organization, but even matter and energy as fortuitously originating or creating themselves, unless produced by an Almighty Eternal Will. ”

“ It is, says an eminent modern physiologist, a matter of "profound significance" that this "particle of jelly [the sarcode of a Foramlnifer] is capable of guiding physical forces in such a manner as to give rise to these exquisite and almost mathematically arranged structures." Respecting the structures themselves, there is no exaggeration in this. No arch or dome framed by human skill is more perfect in beauty or in the realization of mechanical ideas than the tests of some Foraminifera, and none is so complete and wonderful in its internal structure. ”

“ Finally, it is plain that scientific investigation can never bring us within reach of the absolute origin of life, otherwise than by the action of a creative Will. Had we stood on the earliest shore, and had we seen living things appear in the waters where before had been merely inorganic sand or rock, we should have known as little as we know to-day of even the proximate causes of this new departure in nature. ”

“ We are now in a position to understand that the Animal Kingdom had not one but many beginnings, its leading types arriving in succession throughout geological time. Thus the special beginning of any one line of life, or those of different lines, might form special subjects of inquiry; but our present object is to inquire as to the first or earliest - 10 - introduction of life in our planet, and in what form or forms it appeared. We may, therefore, neglect all the vertebrate animals and the air-breathing invertebrates, and may restrict our inquiries to marine invertebrates. ”

“ Even in relation to man himself, he is still man in all the deposits in which we can find his remains, and as remote from the apes of his time, in so far as we know, as he is from those now his contemporaries. It would seem, in short, as if, ashamed of his humble origin, he had carefully obliterated his tracks in ascending from his lowly parentage to the dignity of humanity. But in this he is only following the example of other animals, his predecessors. We may, as is now constantly done by evolutionists, fill up these gaps by plausible conjectures ”

“ If, in accordance with the previous statements, we choose to divide the earth's history by the development of animal life rather than by rock formations, and to regard each period as presided over by dominant animal forms, we shall thus have an age of man, an age of mammals, an age of reptiles and birds, an age of amphibians and fishes, and an age of crustaceans and mollusks. ”

“ The gourmand who enjoys his dinner may have no - 247 - more pleasure in the act than the Amœba which swallows a Diatom; and for all that the man knows of the subsequent processes to which the food is subjected, his interior might be a mass of jelly, with extemporised vacuoles, like that of his humble fellow-animal. The workman or the athlete has bones and muscles of vastly complicated structure, but to him the muscular act is as simple and unconscious a process as the sending out of a pseudopod to a Protozoon. ”

“ So in our descent from the surface on which men live, through the successive rocky layers of the earth's crust, we leave behind, one by one, all the higher forms of life with which we are familiar; but there still remain to us our six groups of aquatic invertebrates, in the guise, it is true, of species and genera now unknown in a living state, yet well represented as far down as the lower part of the Cambrian. ”

“ Whence were such things to come from to occupy the old Archæan hills and sea-basins? and all our knowledge of nature gives us no answer to the question, except that a creative power must have intervened; but in what manner we know not. That this actually occurred, we can, however, be assured by the next succeeding geological formation. We have seen that the granitic and gneissic ridges could furnish pebbles, sand, and clay, and these once deposited in the sea-bottom could be hardened into conglomerate, sandstone and slate. ”

“ Now if the Laurentian graphite represents an exuberance of vegetable growth in those old seas proportionate to the great supplies of carbonic acid in the atmosphere and in the waters, and if the Eozoic ocean was even better supplied with carbonate of lime than those Silurian seas whose vast limestones bear testimony to their richness in such material, we can easily imagine that the conditions may have been more favourable to a creature like Eozoon than those of any other period of geological time. ”

“ So great a revolution of thought, and this based on one fossil, of a character little recognisable by geologists generally, might well tax the faith of a class of men usually regarded as somewhat faithless and sceptical. Yet this new extension of life has been very generally received, and has found its way into text-books and popular treatises. Its opponents have been under the necessity of inventing the most strange and incredible pseudomorphoses of mineral substances to account for the facts. ”

“ Like us, they can subsist only on food which the plant has previously produced; for in this world, from the beginning of time, the plant has been the only organism which could use the solar light and heat as forces to enable it to turn the dead elements of matter into living, growing tissues, and into organic compounds capable of nourishing the animal. Like us, the Protozoa expend the food which they have assimilated in the production of animal force, and in doing so cause it to be oxidized, or burnt away, and resolved again into dead matter. ”

“ Let us take, in connection with all this, the fact that we are dealing with the deposits of the earliest ocean known to us—an ocean warm and abounding in the mineral matters suitable for the skeletons of humble animals, and fitted to nourish aquatic plants. The conditions were certainly favourable to an exuberant development of the lower forms of marine life; and in later times, when such conditions prevail, we generally find that life has been introduced to take advantage of them. ”

“ Thus our dawn-animal has positively no story to tell as to his own introduction or his transmutation into other forms of existence. He leaves the mystery of creation where it was; but in connection with the subsequent history of life we can learn from him a little as to the laws which have governed the succession of animals in geological time. First, - 275 - we may learn that the plan of creation has been progressive, that there has been an advance from the few, low, and generalized types of the primeval ocean to the more numerous, higher, and more specialized types of more recent times. ”

“ Let us then put Eozoon into the witness-box, and try to elicit its testimony as to the beginnings of life; supposing for the moment that it is really an animal, and not a mere pretender; though even in that case, it might serve to represent the first animal, whatever it may have been.
Looking down from the elevation of our physiological and mental superiority, it is difficult to realize the exact conditions in which life exists in creatures so simple as the Protozoa. ”

“ On the other hand, it is hard to believe that one individual life, so to speak, could have continued unimpaired to animate successive and increasing masses of matter in all the vast time extending from the Eozoic to the modern. It is also at least equally possible that the causes and conditions, whatever they were, that produced the earliest Protozoa may have acted again and again in later times, originating new lines of descent with renewed vitality. ”

“ If we deny the claims of Eozoon, then the base of our animal system must for the present be found in the Sponges, Worms, Foraminifera, and Radiolarians of the Huronian, with the problematical laminated forms allied to Cryptozoon which seem to occur even in the Upper Laurentian. Thus in this case the miracle of creation stands before us in a somewhat more complex form, though greatly less so than if we had to accept the fauna of the Lower Cambrian as the oldest known. ”

“ If any part of our work should stand the fire of discussion, let us be thankful. One thing at least is certain, that such careful surveys as those in the Laurentian rocks of Canada which led to the discovery of Eozoon, and such microscopic examinations as those by which it has been worked up and presented to the public, cannot fail to yield good results of one kind or another. ”

“ We can transfer ourselves in imagination back to a time when man and his companion animals of to-day did not exist, when our continents and seas had not assumed their present forms, and even when the earth was an incandescent mass with all its volatile materials suspended in its atmosphere. ”

“ The ocean is now vastly more populous than the land. The waters alone afford the conditions necessary at once for the most minute and the grandest organisms, at once for the simplest and for others of the most complex character. Especially do they afford the best conditions for those animals which subsist in complex communities, and which aggregate large quantities of mineral matter in their skeletons. So true is this that up to the present time all the species of Protozoa and of the animals most nearly allied to them are aquatic. ”

“ The Upper Laurentian of Canada, a rock formation whose distribution, age, and structure have been carefully worked out in several extensive districts by the Canadian Survey, is found to contain thick and widely distributed beds of limestone, related to the other beds in the same way in which limestones occur in the sediments of other geological formations. There also occur in the same formation, graphite, iron ores, and metallic sulphides, in such relations as to suggest the idea that the limestones as well as these other minerals are of organic origin. ”

“ The Amœba or the Eozoon is probably no more than we its own creator; but if it could produce itself out of vegetable matter, or out of inorganic - 248 - substances, it might claim in so far a higher place in the scale of being than we; and as it is, it can assert equal powers of digestion, assimilation, and motion, with much less of bodily mechanism.
In order that we may feel, a complicated apparatus of nerves and brain-cells has to be constructed and set to work; but the Protozoon, without any distinct brain, is all brain, and its sensation is simply direct. ”

“ The plants have collected stores of organic matter, and their minute germs, along with microscopic species, are floating everywhere in the sea. Nay, there may be abundant examples of those Amœba-like germs of aquatic plants, simulating for a time the life of the animal, and then returning into the circle of vegetable life. In these some might see precursors of the Protozoa, though they are probably rather prophetic analogues than blood relations. The plant has fulfilled its function as far as the waters are concerned, and now arises the opportunity for the animal. ”

“ It is this composite sort of life which is connected with the main geological function of the Foraminifer. While active sensation, appetite, and enjoyment pervade the pseudopods and external sarcode of the mass, the hard skeleton common to the whole is growing within; and in this way the calcareous matter is gradually removed from the sea-water, and built up in solid reefs, or in piles of loose foraminiferal shells. Thus it is the aggregative or common life, alike in Foraminifers as in Corals, that tends most powerfully to the accumulation of calcareous matter ”

“ Thus any rational scheme of development of the earth's population in geological time must be, not an agnostic evolution, but a reverent inquiry into the mode by which it pleased the Creator to proceed in His great work. ”

“ They are more blind guides than our primeval Protozoon himself would be, in matters whose real solution lies in the harmony of our own higher and immaterial nature with the Being who is the author of all life—the Father "from whom every family in heaven and earth is named." ”